Slashdot Mirror
U.S. Representatives Torpedo UN Information Summit
StoneLion writes "The United Nations World Summit on Information Society was established to 'harness the potential of knowledge and technology' and to 'find effective and innovative ways to put this potential at the service of development for all.' You'd think open source software would be a natural for many UN member countries. But NewsForge's Joe Barr discovered that the US is driving policy for the organization, and its official position is that 'using free software to achieve the WSIS goals might get in the way of an intellectual property owner's ability to make a profit'; in other words, they want to make the world safe for capitalism." We've mentioned WSIS before. Newsforge and Slashdot are both part of OSDN.
The best thing they can do is make it illegal for spammers to get safe harbor anywhere.
Or, failing that, to make sure that spam only gets sent to the country of origin somehow. That would eliminate 90% of my spam, which is from the US.
Probably it will only end up in another treaty the US will refuse to ratify, like Kyoto and the International Court of Justice.
...my bud that works for one of the U.S. Reps...anxious for the reaction.
Europe has hundreds of years of evil behind it. The US is, at best, a johnny-come-lately to the game of slaughtering millions of people and supporting brutal dictatorships. European imperialism has done more damage to the world than the US could even dream of.
We dismiss European atrocities of 60 years ago as being old and irrelevant, yet we bring up US sins from the start of the country. Very fair and unbiased.
Our foreign policy is not perfect, but then again, no one's is. The idea is to move forward and try not to repeat the same mistakes. Support democracy and human rights - don't support brutal dictatorial regimes. You'd think it would be easier...
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.