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Slashback: Regionalism, Rivalry, Zensur
Even the Gates family probably hates being ripped off by region coding. jmcmurry writes: "I just tried out my daughters Winnie The Pooh from Poland, which can only be played (until today) on my Mac Cube running OS X (I did the region free crack when running OS 9). I own an Xbox with DVD player and thought, hey wouldnt hurt to try it out, since I was in the market to buy a Region Free DVD player (which can cost $400 an up) I plugged everything in, put the DVD in, and lo and behold, it plays the DVD from Poland (region code 2) This makes up for the cost of the Xbox ..."
Nein! Nein! Speaking of things that do (or don't) work by region, several readers submitted information which indicates the pooh-poohing of alleged censorship-by-DNS manipulation in Germany's state of Nordrhein-Westfalen was premature. It turns out that some interesting redirects which seemed to be a technical error or a misguided proof-of-concept, and which were quickly turned off, were reinstated shortly thereafter.
Thorsten Hornung was among the several to write on this topic. "Meanwhile ISIS has reblocked the sites, as Heise online reported (German!) due to pressure from the president of the local Government Mr. Büssow.
The local government of Düsseldorf which is responible for media services in North Rhine-Westphalia has posted a statement on its site (German) about the initial lift of the blockade saying that it believes the censoring meassures have been lifted due to complaints by users. Much worse is that furthermore public accuse people complaining about the censorship to be Right Extremists: 'The local government believes, due to the content of many emails it received today, that they [People Complaining] are users of Right Extremist Internet Content.'
The German Constitution (Grundgesetz) does not allow censorship however there are some restrictions on free speech especially regarding Nazi propaganda."
Winners sometimes use Gnomes. Prashant writes: "Cygwin is turning out to be a breeze of fresh air for people stuck on windows for one reason or another. I can use the familiar bash shell on any platform(win, *nix) I am on, and don't have to deal with the DOS prompt. I use all the gnu tools from cygwin distro. rcs, cvs, vim, perl, python, ruby, apache the list goes on. Not only that, I successfully ran postgresql on Cygwin. The XFree86 port of Cygwin itself can be huge cost saving over commercial X-servers for Windows. I have tried KDE on Cygwin version 1.1.2. I was impressed with it. Here is something new: GNOME ported to Cygwin as well. Let the rivalry ontinue on Windows.
It's all about having options. I would love be 100% Linux user but again sometimes it's not you who decides what os runs on your machine. So till Windows gets replaced by Linux by the authorities, happy cygwining."
This addition brought to you by ... Solar Power! basfromasd writes "The winner of the 3000 km World Solar Challenge race from Darwin to Adelaide has reached the finish in a record breaking time. The winning car, Nuna, was built by the Alpha Centauri team, consisting of 10 university students of TU Delft and University of Amsterdam. Some technical details can be found at their site and at ESA. Results and pictures of the race are at the Centre for Photovoltaic Engineering of UNSW website. Well done for a first time contestant, showing that skill and intelligence can match the resources of factory sponsored teams. They found some good sponsors though: GaAs solar cells are not cheap. Neither are Li-Ion batteries. Some of the solar cells were used in the Hubble Space Telescope before and brought back to earth in 1993. The other cars did not make it before today's curfew. The runner up, Aurora, stopped just outside of Adelaide for the night and is expected to finish tomorrow morning."
I've got it working already :-) (It's all x86, so it wasn't any big hassle)
/.
I'm taking screenshots this evening with my brand-spanking-new digital camera. After I upload the pics I'll submit an article to
Vive le Resistance!
I find this feature particularly strange... Perhaps this was a "forgotten feature" in the DVD pack. After all, based upon reputation, Microsoft should be close allies with the MPAA and RIAA. But, i'm not complaining. Only if the xbox supported progressive scan dvd playing, I would be a happy man... (seems strange that it doesnt. It's more then capable of such a feat).
Of course, i havent owned a console since the Sega Genesis... That system was technically impressive, but alas, not many good games were made for it, and i've never brought a console since. I'm highly considering buying the dreamcast... what a steal for $50!!!!! Of course, that's 50 bucks i could be spending on a geforce3, an xbox, a gamecube, a dual processor motherboard, a car, the ability to press the 'submit comment' button... Wait i can press the............
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
So what is the best thing for us Germans to do now??? We could write complains and be marked as nazis... naahh. What else can we do?
This is such a great example of how easy the gov't can turn protestants againt censorship into a raging nazi crowd. And guess what 99% will read in their newspaper? Yes: Sites blocked, nazis angry, thus censorship is great....
So tell me what to do!
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Cygwin is a little more akin to WineLib -- it's a reimplimentation of the *NIX API. (Plus they throw in a lot of precompiled libs and helper programs like bash, which is nice.) For this, yes, having open-source software makes it a hell of a lot easier, since you know exactly what the hell the API you're trying to target is.
I still don't understand why region coding isn't ruled illegal as a per se violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Oh yeah, Hollywood owns both parties, lock stock and barrel - I forgot.
sulli
RTFJ.
> A German AC who fears U.S.-style freedoms more
> than anything else.
I fear two things:
1) not knowing the state of the Nazi movement
2) blocking of non-Nazi sites without public discussion.
The latter is dangerous and might nurture stereotypes on lots of groups.
Apparently 2) just happened.
I managed to get Windowmaker up and running on Cygwin, under Window 98.
Check it out.
I just had to comment out one line of code and change my username so that it didn't have any spaces in it. It might not have all the bells and whistles of KDE or Gnome, but at least it takes up less memory. Probably faster, too.
-- juju
WOW! That would be .... SLOOOOOOOW
And as others have pointed out, VMWare essentially accomplishes this task. It is also an amazing resource hog.
Now what would be really cool is a way to do rapid dual boot. Something where you could have both OS's resident in some sort of temporary memory. So I can hit a key stroke, and like 10 seconds later be in to the other operating system ready to roll. Basically I'm thinking something like souped up version of laptop hibernation where it stores state.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
We've got a US X-Box here and we just tried playing the MGS2 trailer DVD from Japan. It came up with the message "Invalid DVD region" and wouldn't play it. (Me and my roomates == We) We are hypothesizing that perhaps the DVD dongle they make you buy actually has a region encoded into it? That way they can offload the cost of region coding onto you, the consumer. Would be a typical MS move. Anyone have multiple region dongles and want to try it?
Cryptic Allusion - New Mac and Dreamcast Games!
...is to always include a grammatical error, mistake, flawed reasoning, or some other foible in the article. They always include at least one.
Why? Because somebody will always say something about it, and it will generate more page views and hits and stuff, and sometimes they might even get modded up, generating yet more page views and hits and stuff.
Now, you might just think that the editors have no English skills. This might very well be true. I always picture this meeting taking place, where somebody mentions that they need to improve their skills. Then somebody mentions all the page views and hits and stuff.
The real genius here is that not only do they get to be lazy, they actually benefit from the laziness. It's actually a cool hack, and I almost hate to point this out because I might spoil it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
quite interesting site: ;-)
http://www.firmware.fr.st/
Note that i think DVD should die, this standard is
way to bigbrotherish...
Actually this is old news (11/21/01), but I haven't seen this being mentioned before in this discussion about the German site banning. A member of the German government (SPD) responsible for new media has released a statement regarding the matter at his website, here (German)
:P)
In short, he calls that local politican in NRW a "Schaumschlaeger", which is basically saying "that guy has no clue, acts like he has no clue and just wants to get some attention for the next election". He also says, that banning sites is very dubious in the eyes of the law, whereas DNS banning is not just dubious but technically impossible. Such action would only increase the popularity of the targeted sites, and would also create mirrors, which in turn would ridicule the action. He also states, that DNS banning can be circumvented by the easiest of methods by every user.
He concludes, that instead more concern should be focused on teaching young kids how to cope with the medium in a responsible way, and that the state should focus on "fighting" the creators of such Nazi, child porn etc. sites - instead of fighting the internet as such.
He also mentiones, that banning is generally unrealistic, as there is no way to decide in consent which sites should get banned and he mentiones something like a filter, which could be used by parents not by the state.. etc.. (Sorry, for my humble English, it's not my primary language and it's rather late over here.
It was not the German Government who blocked those sites, it was the Government of the State of Nordrhein-Westfahlen which is only one state of 16 in the Federal Republic of Germany. (It would be similar if, maybe, Iowa started to block websites, which is only 1/51th of the whole US).
Also those censoring requests were only limited to two local ISPs which are resident in Nordrhein-Westfalen. Apart from the apparent impracticality of such a request (It would suffice to use another ISP based in one of the other states to still access those sites) from a legal standpoint it is forbidden to publish certain Material related to National Socialism in germany.
This includes but is not restricted to: Adolf Hitlers "Mein Kampf", certain Nazi Symbols like the swastika or the regalia of the SS or the Gestapo (but only when they are not used for educational purposes), Promotion of the Nazi Ideology (the legal term is "Volksverhetzung" which is a federal offesne) and the denial of the Holocaust. (Which is also a federal offense).
It might seem quite strange to American people to actually restrict something like that, especially since "Freedom of speech" is one of their prime directives (which leaves room to discussion) but especially when it comes to anything concerned with National Socialism, german politicians get extremely cautious and PC.
One cause for this policy is that we fear that something like WW2 or the Holocaust might actually happen again if we are not very careful. (Which is to some extend simply paranoia).
But we do have a Nazi Problem in Germany. Those right wing groups are very well organized. (Quite similar to those in the US) Some studies say that there are about 500.000 People in Germany who actually support this Ideology. (But the radicals are still only a minority)
Almost the only way to actually arrest the leaders of this movement is to outlaw the Use of National socialistic Symbols and propaganda. Would we handle it like the US then we could never get hold of them and actually could only watch impassively as the would gather more followers.
Something which no right thinking German could easily allow.
It is not a policy of "looking the other way" quite the contrary. I leave it to you to evaluate if this is the right way (tm), but actually suggesting that germany does this so it can calm its conscience is not only wrong but also very offensive to me.
Jeff