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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."
It certainly seems strange that cygwin is getting so much publicity recently. Anyhow. It certainly seems like a great way for running linux software on win32...
:).
Microsoft includes a similar (but far inferior) package with Windows 2000 that (hypocrtically) uses GPLed software...
Cygwin is basically the same concept as WINE (windows on unix) and Executor (macos 7ish(68k) on win32 and unix). Isn't it much easier to write this sort of thing for an open source operating system
An intresting concept would be if I could play my Loki ports on win32.... i get the best of both worlds, and don't have to deal with WINE...
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Comments like that make me really sad. If you don't make the decision to make a change yourself, then no one will do it for you. Come on... take the initiative and do something new.
If Micro$oft writes an OS for the Xbox, will it be called X Windows?
Being a German and reading this bullshit about the Bundesgrenzschutz and censorship I feel like I need to say something about this.
First of all, censorship is happening everywhere. And I think it's worse if the U.S. government manages to supress information in the Linux kernel changelog for all people (U.S.American or not!), for instance. You might argue that this is a special case, but on the other hand Nazi-propaganda is a special case in Germany as well.
The Linux kernel changelog doesn't harm anybody. Nazi-propaganda can destroy a whole nation (and I'm not just talking about the German nation, think of all those anti-black-sites and the likes on AMERICAN servers that are polluting and twisting YOUR children's brains).
The German "constitution" (as Grundgesetz could be translated) has a very strict set of laws regarding anti-constitutional organisations and opinions. But just imagine, we wouldn't have this: There would be no legal (!!!) possibility to stop Nazi-propaganda and soon other countries (and I guess on first place the USA) would be raving about Nazi-Germany. So they are left raving about Censorship-Germany.
This censorship is and will always be a complicated process. The discussion about a censorship of the NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschland = Nationaldemocratic Party of Germany) became very difficult: Apart from discussions whether it's good or bad to ban a right-wing party and its impact on all people associated with this party, there was also the issue whether the NPD was truly anti-constitutional and whether banning a whole party is anti-democratic.
I've been told from Swedish people that young German people have a very bad conscience. That's true.
Hitler destroyed the German nation not only with his Nazi-ideology-venom but he also rendered all non-Nazis inable to discuss a right-wing-idea neutrally and non-emotionally.
When Günther Grass hinted that he has the opinion that the Holocaust should not be revived in every new generation, he was called a "Nazi".
This is not only because non-nazistic Germans themselves are against Nazismn, but also because of all the other countries in the world which tend to look very careful on Germany and whether a new Hitler is popping up.
Regarding this Bundesgrenzschutz-issue: Bundesgrenzschutz is officially translated with "Protection of Borders". Those people tend to be picky in all nations.
It is true that the Bundesgrenzschutz focuses on non-western-people (like Russians and all those USA-hating people from the Near East).
I wonder whether the U.S. american customs police isn't doing the same? Or are they never suspicious if somebody from Cuba wants to enter the USA? (My father was being investigated upon entering the USA, I guess because of his style of clothing.)
And last not least: I don't believe that you can "sue people for libel".
All governments have their dark sides (just think of the atomic bomb experiments on american soldiers in the 1940s) and I wouldn't be too suprised to learn something new evil about the German government but for now I don't believe you. Please prove your accusations!