Slashdot Mirror
Cuba Switching to Linux
Tony Montana writes "According to several news sites the government of Cuba is dumping Windows in favour of Linux. Cuba's director of information technology, Roberto del Puerto, says that Cuba already has approximately 1500 computers running on Linux, and is working towards replacing Windows on all state owned computers."
how many people will make a comment about communism and linux....
this is 1
yeah 1500 computers !!, eat that AMIGA !!
Yay for me. ;)
Not that we could import windows due to the trade sanctions anyway
(btw yes its a joke , my name is a pun)
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
I'm assuming that all Cuban installations of Windows are pirate copies anyway, because it's illegal for US companies to sell to Cuba (very stiff penalties).
is how the Bay of Penguins incident began...
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
In communist Cuba Linux switches you! Oh my ...
I think this snippet sums up a lot of the recent Linux "migration" stories:
Which is sad, since I've had a fairly painless transition to Linux a few years ago. Given the state of WINE these days, there's very little that a Linux-only box can't do that a Wintel box can.
Old news, saw it in the local newspaper, 'nuff said
That's great Cuba has such a positive image. This is bound to make people switch to linux in droves.
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
Can I get my Che Tux Revolution TShirt signed by Fidel?
Well, we all know that OpenSource is Communism :)
$> cd
$> more beer
a whole new meaning :)
:)
But if serious it is half funny, half serious. Let's see how Microsoft friendly [tm] press will spin it
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
First thing he did was nationalize the sugar industry. I'm sure getting rid of Micro$oft is in the same vein to him.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
Man, not only do the illegals have to deal with never speaking the language when they boat over, but now they will have the deal with not being able to use the computers that are here either.
Quid Pro Quo, nothing more, nothing less.
How are we ever going to spy on these countries if they stop using Windows?
Cuba already has approximately 1500 computers running on Linux, and is working towards replacing Windows on all state owned computers.
Aren't all of the computers there owned by the state?
All we need is another multi billion dollar company with a reason to lobby for invading Cuba...
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
oh wait.....
If the US won't sell software to Cuba then why should anyone be surprised when Cuba stops using US-made OS's?
I expect Castro feels safer with Linux anyway as he's problaby concerned about all those NSA-mandated backdoors in Windows.
Bad Cuba, bad commies!
Who's your user, program?
Middle America? Step away from the Tolkien, laddie.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
joke 4323: That finally declares the name RED Hat!
If Microsoft was mass, stupidity would be gravity.
Who? Cuba? Cuba has about as many WMD as Iraq did.
That they got from where? China or North Korea? You think we wouldn't notice it coming in? Did they built a tunnel under the ocean from the Pacific over to Cuba?
Give me a break.
Cuba switch to a real democracy and they will be all set.
Yeah. The Helms-Burton law has only been on the books since 1996. Bill Gates told me it was on his stack of things to read when he had time, right after Sarbanes-Oxley. Dealing with monopoly lawsuits in Europe had him kind of tied up right now.
My guess is the Cuban equivalent of NewEgg is willing to buy copies of Windows in some free and open trading partner like Libya and sell them to Cuba. I'm wondering how the support calls work:
"Reinstale por favor Windows."
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
What? They want free software and cheap music?
Misaligned in reference to what ?
To your soon-to-be (or it-is-already) dictature ?
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
My thought exactly. And, if you RTFA (very short, all three of them) you'll find the following: "Del Puerto said his office was working on a legal framework that would allow the replacement of the Windows system". I wonder which legal framework is that? In a country that has the dictator with the longest time in office in the whole world, how much of a "legal framework" is needed, anyhow?
(BTW, congrats to you, twelfth comment and the first non-stupid, non-redundant one).
Well there's obviously other routes of buying Windows than just from Redmond. First of all Microsoft is an international company. It's possible that Cuba could buy copies of Windows from say Microsoft India, or more likely Microsoft Mexico.
Microsoft obviously also has distributors outside the United States, and it's perfectly legal for them to sell to Cuba.
AccountKiller
This isn't the story that proves it however, given that Cuba is not communist but (at best) an example of Really Existing Socialism and (at worst) a rather nasty dictatorship.
I remember sitting in an internet cafe at a resort in Cuba, wondering why they didn't use linux. Now maybe they will. My personal anecdote aside, I look forward to the day when it will hurt the US not to deal with Cuba; given its current popularity among European and Canadian travellers, I think it is coming. Cuba is still stable, and, indeed, has outlasted the Soviet Union.
But that is the "great" thing about the GPL and similar OSS licenses. Its free to anyone dispite ideological differences. If it wasn't, a F/OSS advocating developer could bar me from using their software because I also use non-Free software. A staunch pro-life developer of a scheduling package could bar an abotion clinic from using their software. If something is going to be free, it needs to be free, not "kinda-free, only when you agree with us"
Free MacMini
This is likely no more than an economic advantage, its obvious that the Cubans could care less about freedom of anything Cuba is cracking down on internet access, make sure you bring a few copies of various Linux distros inside your "music" CD holder when you visit. Its good that linux is being adopted in these countries but the whole freedom thing RMS is on is being avoided. Also, am i the only one who noticed "Tony Montana" in the sidebar there? Absolutely Genius. :)
how many people in Cuba actually have computers? I'll bet that people living there don't even know what a computer is.
They used their newly invented matter transporter of course.
PRINT "Signature line broken."
GOTO 1
((invasion-happy US Govn't) * (API-hiding OS vendor)) ** (US Govn't allows OS Vendor to violate it own laws) = (run forest run)
It's up to Cuban copyright law to decide whether you should have to pay Microsoft to use copies of their software.
Smacks of a reasonable business decision to me.
Or, can you produce any anecdotal evidence that SmartTags have somehow improved your revenues?
I'm happy to admit that MS Office is a swell product, if we can, in the same orgy of objectivity, admit that it was feature-complete around Office97 or so.
Oh, wait...that would hurt the value of my MSFT shares. Never mind.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Sorry, I meant dictatorship.
Votez ecolo : Chiez dans l'urne !
This has got me thinkning. If Cuba is switching to Linux, there is a greater possibility that North Korea uses or will switch to Linux too. This is actually good because imagine at some super secret North Korea nuclear missile silo, some Windows box displays: "A fatal exception 0E has occurred at 0028:C0011E36 in VXD VMM(01)+00010E36. The current application, 'missiles standby', will be terminated." So actually, there IS a reason they call it the blue screen of DEATH.
some governments and large organizations have switched to the free Linux system or have threatened to do so to get discounts.
:P.
For as rich as that seems, for some reason the thought simply never occurred to me that people actually got away with this
As for Cuba switching OS's, it's a smart move only in terms of the fact that the nation is far from wealthy. With a total national GDP roughly the size of Alaska's (33.2b in Cuba according to the CIA vs 31.4b for Alaska according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis), any cost savings they could get would be obviously welcomed, Communist or otherwise.
IM assuming the WMD are free universal health care, sustainable agriculture and quality education for all its citizens. :)
We cannot have these ideas spreading.
This was to be expected from a bearded no-good like Fidel Castro!!!
I think we could use this as an opportunity to bridge the gap between the US and Cuba. I know that the rift is only between the governments, but maybe the people can build a bridge of friendship and in some way help improve things.
I'm not a troll, but I play one on Slashdot.
Another reason is that putting any political agendas in software licenses is not leagally right (You can put them there of cource, but they have no effect)
Dyslexics have more fnu.
Linux is not communism, it's libertarism since you share it freely. In the other hand closed source is communism since it's closed and you can't really change things plus Gates is dictator. :)
http://archonon.sytes.net/
Even if they can, Cuba has loved linux for a while - obviously, even if they can they don't want to depend from USA technology. Infomed, for one (the national healtcare information sharing or whatever you english people call it) is based in linux at least
AFAIK I am not allowed to export goods from the USA if I know they will end up in Cuba. So what loophole does Mr. Softie exploit?
I think we've found a new location for piratebay2.com
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
Microsoft obviously also has distributors outside the United States, and it's perfectly legal for them to sell to Cuba.
Or even Microsoft Canada. We don't buy into the isolationist argument up here, and we don't get our knickers bent out of shape trying to "prove" that communism doesn't work but undermining Cuba at every opportunity.
not sure, but afaik all of AMDs cpus are made in Germany these days.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
While the "linux = commies" jokes are in abundance, ironically, Linux might not be so welcome as soon as the Cuban government sees that Linux promotes the free exchange of ideas. Wouldn't it be ironic if the socialism-in-a-kernel that is Linux ended up hurting the grip of a communist government?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I was in Cuba last October. All of the PCs I saw were running a very locked down version of NT4.0
Excuse me, sir or madame, but you've just referred to historical information in a way that doesn't clearly take an ideological stance about the Cuban regime, which we're all bound by tacit patriotic loyalty oaths to revile root and branch. You did so in a manner that referred, obliquely, both to current anticorporate sentiment in "the states" and to potentially sympathetic positions taken by an Out of Bounds Bad Guy. This unseemly display of ambiguously-intended "nuance" has caused your name to be included in a certain list down at the office.
I wonder if you wouldn't mind stepping over here and putting your hands up on the wall...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Keep this in mind the next time you're scratching that itch.
--
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It would only make sense that the Commie's in Cuba would switch to the "Communist" GPL'd Linux.
:)
Well since the U.S cant sell any of their good to cuba, then the cubans must get their PC from some other country. Hmm didn't lenovo take over IBM's pc production, and are'nt lenovo a chinese company? and are'nt the chinese commies? hmmm...
Bits of News Giving you the latest bits.
What worries me is importing what is made in cuba into the US.
What happens when cuban sysadmins start submitting patches into linux? is this not then code that is a product of cuba? that would be Illegal to bring into the USA.
which then comes into a linux used in the USA?
This worries me, as then microsoft could use this as a legal loophole to prohibit the use of Linux in the USA.
That would be a big boon for them as then they would have no competition.
Think about it. How ridiculous does it sound. Or not?
Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps Canadian companies that sell computers sold the Cubans their computers and Windows? Canada does a lot of business with Cuba. Just because the US has a trade embargo with Cuba does not mean that the rest of the world has to follow. As for selling to Communists, well the Bush, Clinton, Bush, Reagan, etc. administrations had no problem selling to Communists, they just have a problem with selling to Cubans.
I think you forget that the software is Microsoft's property. It's up to Microsoft to determine the terms under which it's willing to allow the use of its software in Cuba. Cuba has no right to declare that it can use the software without compensation.
Linucs, que lindo es Linucs
quien lo cómpila lo quiere mas!
In related news: Linus Torvalds' father was in the Communist party, did you know that?
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
Cubans eat lots of chicken.
Chicken eating = communism
eat beef. It's whats for dinner.
Intellectual property doubly so.
Australia
South Korea
Brazil
Spain
India
Vienna
French Police
Dutch
Venezuela
Germany
Roberto del Puerto: Good job amigo - now ve show those Microsoft bastards ve don't use zeir windows!
/. : Roberto del Puerto (as reported on Slasdot the other day ) has defected to the US...
:)
Sysadmin: Thank you Thank you!
Roberto: Hey! What's this? No start Button? How do i use zis thing?
Sysadmin: Uhhh you open an Xterm and you type in a few commands
Roberto: But my Motorola smartphone - it no work? Oh no - how will the rest of the idiots use zeese systems?
Sysadmin: That's your problem amigo - you told me to put linux, so i put Linux on zem machines
Roberto: Oh no! Fidel will have my cigars and my head!!
Sysadmin: *shrug*
Next day on
Sorry - couldn't resist
thats very true. Say something bad about the goverment though, and see how free you are.
The distributors does not count, as they are just that. The key issue is the EULA, which is between the user and Microsoft. Nothing about any distributors there.
Unfortunately, that's bollocks. If Cuban law states that "you need not ask permission or pay anything before using software written by someone else" then it is no longer up to Microsoft. Not in Cuba anyway.
Remember, rights are not universal; they're granted at the discretion of the country in question, however much we might wish it otherwise.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
You could add the US to the top of that list, pal.
What's worse: a country openly proclaiming communism, or one that espouses freedom -- all the while attempting to deny it's own citizens the right to freely travel and increasing surveillance in the name of "fighting terror". Oh, and not to mention all of the "detainees" held in Gitmo. These folks, while probably a bad lot, are being held without being charged with a crime, denied access to legal representation, and in some cases have had thier HUMAN RIGHTS violated. This is the kind of shit that I used to bring up about Cuba and China.
God save the US. God Damn the current US regime.
I've been to Cuba, and I loved going to Cuba. The people were wonderful - friendly, charming, and Cuban women surely give interested tourists the best welcome one would ever want :-).
But all I heard from citizens was gripes about the government. The "free" healthcare is worth about as much as you'd expect a dictator's promises to be worth. The capitalist things, like the taxi system, work gloriously. The hotels, being right under the government's thumb, are a model for poor service and bizarre rules. For instance, you can't take your Cuban girlfriend up to your hotel room without paying a bribe.
I read a lot of books on Cuba before I went, and it seems like people who go to Cuba with an ideological agenda are shuttled carefully to the right places, where things look shiny and new. This is a potemkin village that impresses the heck out of people who want to be impressed.
But if you go a few blocks away, you see scenes like I did. All these pictures were taken on what would be prime real estate in any other country, a block or less from the Malecon, the giant seawall that faces the ocean and is a major gathering spot for Cubans.
Cubans live in their decrepit and dangerous housing until it collapses, because if they maintained it the government would take it over and give it to someone else. No joke, sadly.
To put this slightly on topic, Cubans are generally not allowed to use the Internet, at least not at prices Cubans can afford. The Internet connections in the tourist hotels are closed to Cubans; only non-Cubans can use them. This is part of an effort to keep tourists on the busses and away from contact with the Cuban people.
The Cuban computers I saw were woefully out of date, with truly ancient versions of Windows on display. If my memory serves it was mainly Windows98, and I went in December 2002. So I doubt that this mandate from Castro will have that much effect. It's probably a propaganda effort to make Slashdotters look at his rule more favourably.
Even open source tyranny is still tyranny.
Alas.
D
One pictures Castro saying over and over, "No, that's 'free' as in 'beer'..."
Wouldn't some US embargos prevent the distribution from the US to Cuba of Linux? I'm certain it wouldn't stop anyone from wanting to use Linux/OSS in Cuba, but this is somewhat interesting.
Naww, I doubt Cuba has WMDs - last time that happened, we noticed and set off a crisis.
I need to get some fresh air I think ...
I'm assuming that all Cuban installations of Windows are pirate copies anyway, because it's illegal for US companies to sell to Cuba (very stiff penalties). Could they not have purchased the copies of Windows legally from a reseller in Mexico?
I wish I had some mod points for you. If you ever read a real estate appraisal, they implicitly acknowledge that you don't really "own" property. Rather, you own certain "rights" to property, ie fee simple, leasehold, tenant-in-common, etc.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Interesting. I did wonder if there was such a clause, and obviously there is. It does make sense, even though I think the trade embargo the US places on Cuba is bad for both countries.
AccountKiller
%windowscd%\win98\precopy2.cab\license.txt ...
7. EXPORT RESTRICTIONS. If this EULA is not labeled and the SOFTWARE PRODUCT is not identified as "North America Only Version" above, on the Product Identification Card, or on the SOFTWARE PRODUCT packaging or other written materials, then the following terms apply: You agree that you will not export or re-export the SOFTWARE PRODUCT to any country, person, or entity subject to U.S. export restrictions. You specifically agree not to export or re-export the SOFTWARE PRODUCT: (i) to any country to which the U.S. has embargoed or restricted the export of goods or services, which as of March 1999 include, but are not necessarily limited to Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan and Syria, or to any national of any such country, wherever located, who intends to transmit or transport the SOFTWARE PRODUCT back to such country; (ii) to any person or entity who you know or have reason to know will utilize the SOFTWARE PRODUCT or portion thereof in the design, development or production of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons; or (iii) to any person or entity who has been prohibited from participating in U.S. export transactions by any federal agency of the U.S. government. You warrant and represent that neither the BXA (as defined below) nor any other U.S. federal agency has suspended, revoked or denied your export privileges.
The latest Slashdot meme.
Anyone in for a Cuba Libre^H^H^Hnux-distro? Or will it be Fidel Distro?
"Honey, I feel a certain distance between us..." "Really? A 31ms ping ain't that bad..."
"Ignorance is not security."
Feeling insecure as of lately?
Yes but It is hard to complain that a system is failing when the largest super power in history has banned all trade and imposed terrible sanctions against you.
Makes it rather difficult to evaluate things honestly.
Grr.. this thinking irks me. We are seeing a lot of it (RIAA, recent Iraqui kickback scandals with Scottish members of parliament). The US can make whatever damned laws they like - that doesn't make them enforcable outside the US.
How can MS (US) be held accountable for what MS (Country X) does? MS (US) is the only division of Microsoft to whom US law applies.
Let me know if I am missing something.
Indeed many CPUs are made in either Germany or Malaysia. Also, who said Cuba was buying Microsoft products?
Last time I was there (last year), I heard quite a few anti-Castro jokes and comments against the government. Although, those types of things you say in private amongst people you know. It has to be kept on the down low.
Here's an interesting note, Audioslave played in Habana a couple of weeks ago to a crowd of 70,000 people. It was a few show. I thought that was kinda neat.
The saddest thing is that Castro really screwed things up. Cuba was one of the 3 wealthiest countries in the Western hemi-sphere along with the U.S. and Argentina. What a shame.
Microsoft is an American corporation, it isn't legally allowed to profit from or provide goods or services that are shipped to Cuba. If I am understanding the US Trade Embargo correctly...
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Because everybody knows just how much pull all Slashdotters have in political circles... ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
I think it might not be a bad idea to amend the GPL to insist that no Communism or politically misaligned countries / organizations should be able to use it. This would help combat some of the negative sterotypes facing OSS.
Aside from the fact that it would then no longer be open source (see point #5), I cannot even begin to believe how STUPID and POINTLESS this would be.
Chances are that the country has no obligation to honour the license. And there's not much you can do about that.
Second, most GPL code is licensed under a "version 2 or (at your option) any later versioN" license. So if a country wanted to use GPLed software, couldn't because of a stupid thing in it saying "no communists", and for some reason couldn't change the law to allow it, they would just license it under an older version of the license.
is that Cuba has not been using OSS already to this degree. It seems like an obvious move for a country with their economic status. This should be good for their universities especially, since they don't cost money to attend and their software really should be kept up to date in the most cost efficient way.
I don't thing that this is a big move for the freedom of the people, although it does help to free the government from the rule foreign corporations.
That's only US law, not something with real teeth like the MS EULA.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
I think you forget that the software is Microsoft's property. It's up to Microsoft to determine the terms under which it's willing to allow the use of its software in Cuba. Cuba has no right to declare that it can use the software without compensation.
If Cuba isn't a signatory to the international copyright convention, then Cuba has every right to do whatever it wants with Microsoft products.
However, it seems it is a member of the WIPO, so I suspect it is legally bound to recognize Microsoft's copyright.
How can MS (US) be held accountable for what MS (Country X) does? MS (US) is the only division of Microsoft to whom US law applies.
Because they aren't seperate companies. Microsoft is incorporated in the US, so it's a US company. The fact that they have some people in India, Canada, Mexico, etc doesn't change that fact. As far as trade with Cuba goes it has to follow US law.
AccountKiller
You make a very interesting point. I guess it comes down to a definition in law as to:
a) What constitutes a product of Cuba?
b) What products of Cuba are legal to import into the US?
With regard to point b, what I am getting at is, is it legal to take things from Cuba into the US if there is no profit involved, and no chance that some poor Cuban will get some money to pay for a bit of health care or food as a result of that product being shipped out?
Castro is the President, not a dictator. Cuba has a parliament, and *gasp*, a constitution.
-Reid
You have pictures? I have pictures too! I have some pictures from Santa Clara, Ranchuelo, and La Habana. I have video from Varadero Beach - the one which Hemmingway proclaimed to be the most beautiful beach in the world. It truely is a nice beach.
? action=logout
Here's my pictures. I went last year. They're mostly family pictures though. Not that interesting, but I have them. http://photobucket.com/albums/y161/joesedge/Cuba/
or does using a Free and Open standard like Linux in a closed and controlled envoirnment like Communism seem rather "paradoxical"?
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
"Remember, rights are not universal; they're granted at the discretion of the country in question, however much we might wish it otherwise."
That's not true in the US. You have inalienable rights. The government does not grant you rights, they can only restrict your natural rights when there is a need. The constitution defines the power of government to restrict your rights.
how many people will make a comment about communism and linux
Communism makes some people see red (:-), so leave it out.
More relevant here is that Linux and open source in general is about cooperation and collaboration without an enemy, whereas sociopolitical systems usually have an enemy within and always have an enemy without. Our collaborative community has no real similarity to any of that, despite the political FUD occasionally dished out by the vested interests that we're treading on.
So yeah, we'll get some negative political mud thrown at us, but who cares. It's just the death throes of the old cathedral dinosaurs on their way out.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Viva La Penguinista!
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Summary: you can be arrested and detained for up to four years because the police think you appear dangerous and might commit a crime. Police are using this power to imprison people who are not criminals by any stretch of the imagination - it's a purely repressive tactic, used to intimidate and control.
If anything, the American media is too soft on Cuba, often forgetting (as apparently you have) that it is one of the last holdouts of an unacceptably repressive style of government that much of the 20th century was spent abolishing. Unless you actually live there, you do the Cuban people a disservice by trying to diminish the seriousness of these problems.
Maybe the US could put a trade embargo on Cuba to force it to honour its 'legal' obligations...
Do you work for IEEE legal department ?
(search google for IEEE petition)
#include "coucou.h"
My first thought when I read the article was "Did the Cuban government pay for those copies?". They couldn't have payed for them as you mentioned, its not legal to sell or export to Cuba.
Does any one know how Cuba got windows? I don't give a hoot whether they paid or not. I am just curious to see if Bill is selling to the commies without the US govt approval.
If you think every guy in GITMO would just filter back home and take no further part against the US or current Afghan or Iraqi govt. you are crazy.
That may have been the case when each side freed POWs in past wars, but not this time.
If you place greater importance on the human rights of these guys over the welfare of our troops then you are a dick.
I remember our local left-of-center rag going on about American profligate use of energy, pointing to color TVs as offenders, how black and white TVs use much less energy and are preferred in . . . Cuba. Never mind that modern solid-state color TVs use about as much electricity as an average light bulb and that Cuba's energy conservation kick may have more to do with their economics rather than Uncle Fidel being friends with Amory Lovins.
I would put the love of Linux in the same category. Sure, it is great that someone economizes by not paying a tithe to Microsoft, but bragging about Cuba switching to Linux is kind of like saying, "Linux, the choice of a third-world failing Communist dictatorship with an aging nutcase leader."
Oh, and about the response that Cuba is the victim of the U.S. trade embargo -- I believe just about everyone else in the world trades with Cuba and visits Cuba.
I have worked in Cuba...They only respect copyrights from non-US companies.
Their logic is: "We aren't allowed to have this, so we can't pay for it even if we wanted to".
The amount of pirated software/music/movies floating around Cuba is impressive. No one I have ever met down there has paid a copyright owner anything even indirectly. The closest they may have come would be if a RIAA or similar copyright owner vacationed in Cuba and bartered some CDs in exchange for cigars.
Thanks to Google (who will only be around for a brief while to help us with this stuff...):
Third-world countries...
This are one more of the migrations than they will occur on the part of the third-world Latinoamericános countries (desire not to be contemptuous, since I am of Mexico).
This migration of Windows towards Linux in these countries (on the part of the GOVERNMENT) will occur for several reasons, first, because the countries will wish to spend less// in software, or símplemente to obtain _ more value by its money _ (as for me I believe that that is Linux, since although the TCO is equal or superior, long term Linux offers better valos than any propietary platform).
On the other hand, the governments also will wish to separate of Windows since is a fastening towards the American government (you do not have that Word do you), although Microsoft is directly not bound to the government, indiréctamente having licenses of software of this company promuebe the economic dependency of the country towards the United States.
Finally, the governments will begin to use Free Software within their systems by the nature of the same one, that is to say, the capital inverted in Free Software is a capital that goes (or can go diréctamente) towards the people who develop software and also the generated technologies disposition of ALL the citizens has left directly. Thus, a government can contribute bottoms for the development of some product that consider necessary (simpelemente to way of/bounty/) and see obtain the necessary programs.
This last one is plus a reason that I have thought. As citizen I would prefer that my taxes were used to subsidize Free Software instead of subsidizing to a Estadounidense company. And it is precise to indicate that between the Latin American citizens there is a resentment towards the government North American at issue economic (good... and in other questions who do not come to the subject).
As for me, it seems to me excellent that Cuba is optador by Linux, although like other people have written, in Cuba was not possible "To buy" Windows, but I am sure that the use of Linux in Cuba will generate a strong aid to the development of the same software, since Cuba has people and minds very, very able.
In addition, I must express that I would like much that my country (Mexico) followed the same route, although desafortunádamente Miguel de Icaza did not know to raise the situation (E-Mexico) arguing for the Costs like the advantage of Linux on the propietary software.
That is everything, I hope that it does not bother my commentary to them in Spanish, but, I considered pertienente.
If it's communism, then isn't every computer in Cuba owned by the state?
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
And the constitution can't be changed?
jh
For instance, you can't take your Cuban girlfriend up to your hotel room without paying a bribe.
Cuban girlfriends - yeah, that's another area where capitalism works nicely
The free as in speach surely doesn't appeal to Fidelito.
"It was a few show."
In case people miss it, it was a free show.
WeRelate.org - wiki-based genealogy
I don't believe Canadian subsidiaries of US companies are allowed to sell to Cuba either. The parent company just gets in trouble.
Cheers,
-b
Hasta La Victoria Siempre, Ernesto Che Guevara
Free/OSS revolution pales in comparison to Cuban revolution, but cross fertilisation of ideas is a Good Thing.
'I went out drinking with Thomas Paine,
He saud that all revolutions are not the same'
-Billy Bragg
I like the idea that Gnu/linux is centrally planned through Linus Torvalds, and gives everyone the tools to innovate pretty much however they would like.
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
Cuba's a good actor and all (not too sure about Radio though), but I had NO IDEA he was such a computer geek!
I look forward to the day when people stop letting themselves be consumed with hatred.
In politics, like in Poker, you have to play the hand you are dealt, not the one you wanted to have.
The US is a 100 miles from Cuba and a superpower always willing to "flex it's muscles". None of that is a new development. Fidel Castro should have played his hand taking this into consideration (see realpolitik for an example of a politician taking geographic realities into account).
Closest place to buy them is Bermuda. I had no problems bringing them back with me.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
You and those European and Canadian travellers are merely turning a blind eye to the repression of the Cuban people, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
On the off-chance that you'd like to alleviate your some of your ignorance about Cuba, I recommend studying its current human rights record. This page is a good place to start. Note that this is from a European human rights agency, to take the question of American bias out of the picture. Also, see my post here for a summary.
Summary: you can be arrested and detained for up to four years because the police think you appear dangerous and might commit a crime.
And what crime has Jose Padilla committed? He's been in a military jail for years, denied a lawyer because the powers that be in the US have declared him a terrorist, although they don't seem to want to actually charge him with anything.
Seems to me that we're more than happy to detain people too when we don't like them.
And before you dismiss me as some liberal loony, check that link again. It's not just liberals pissed about Bush trampling all over the Bill of Rights in the name of "keeping us safe from terror."
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
It does. Now if we could just get people to understand that the word "communism" doesn't mean what they think it means.
No, they don't. When a centralized authority assumes control of the resource, they own it. Communism relies on the gullibility of "the people" to believe that the State will act altruistically. Lenin referred to these people as "useful idiots".
A free market economy is the only place where "the people" can truly own a resource. A non-democratic, centrally controlled government does not sell shares. Corporations do.
I was carefully using "country" in the broadest possible sense. In America, your rights are determined less by the government and more by a hodgepodge of history, mob rule and corporate interests. The principle that rights are an artefact of the legal system still applies. I felt it was important to make that point as the parent poster had apparently not grasped this concept.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Oh I love personal attacks... I place greater importance on getting our troops out of the middle east, where they don't belong.
Probably most of the computers in Cuba are state-owned, and they buy motherboards, monitors, etc, and assemble them. The copyright laws in Cuba are very different, and, if you make a copy of a software and install it on your computer, you don't have to pay the copyright owner - thus, there are "pirate" copies of Windows floating in Cuba.
Cuba is an isolated country because of their copyright laws, as they can't even be part of the World Trade Organization.
YHBT. HAND.
Very high literacy rates and low infant mortality at USA level, among other tidbits : Population, Health and Human Well-being : COUNTRY PROFILE - Cuba
>I like the idea that Gnu/linux is centrally planned through Linus Torvalds, and gives everyone the tools to innovate pretty much however they would like.
I could have said Linux Torvalds refuses to plan at the high level, and at the low level we are forced to use Gnu/Linux, because it is the best set of tools for the masses.
I was never good at definative statements.
Be Free: Free Software Tuition
While the US is not at all a small country, it is not the only one. Pretty much the rest of the world has no trade sanctions against Cuba. Sure, things get more expensive if you have to ship them from/to Europe instead from mainland US. And, yes, it would be easier for American tourists to come there than European. But Cuba should be able to compete with lower price of the workforce.
If they had skilled workers. And if they had an industry to talk about. If someone was investing in their industry.
They don't. So their export is at about $200/head.
Why a communist country like Cuba used Windows® in the first place?
I still have an IBM 365DX laptop running Windows95. It controls my house. Every 100 days or so, all the lights shut off, and I'm guided to its rickety keyboard by the soft flickering of blue that emanates from the ancient screen. Then...CTRL+ALT+DEL, and the lights come on in less than a minute.
Sure, I could use debian and cron to replicate the control software. But I'm an American...I use proprietary closed source software!
(sic)
I agree. Assuming Cuba is paying for Windows (possibly from Microsoft Canada?) out of necessity, it's better to support a company that isn't based in the U.S. -- for philisophical reasons.
However, that leads to the next big question -- which distro will Cuba use... or will they roll their own?
There are a few Spanish-language distros available to choose from that aren't owned by large American companies.
If they do choose to role their own, what copyright law exists to make sure that they don't fork it off and close the source themselves? If for economic reasons, they're only interested in free beer, this is a risk.
--- Dan
To wit, Cuba does a fair trade with everyone else on the planet. Not being able to (directly) sell cigars and wicker baskets to Floridians isn't exactly killing them. The incompetant central authority run by a senile peasant military dictator might be part of the problem.
Actually the embargo has nothing to do if a profit is made or not. An US citizen with a permit to travel to Cuba (and that's very, very rare) can bring back Cuban goods up to a value of 100.00 USD. Others are not permitted to import anything Cuban into the US.
There where rumours that non-USians are permitted to bring 50 Cuban cigars for personal consumption. Unfortunately this is bollocks.
If you do find Cuban cigars in the US the only advise I can give you is to stay clear. It's not so much the legal side, but your chances are in the 90-95% range that you just bought a fake Cohiba for 40 bucks. This applies also for Mexico, the entire Caribean and virtually any cruise ship originating from the US. The only exception are La Casa Del Habano franchises. It's incredible profitable business and your customers usually don't shoot you when they are not happy with the merchandise.
This is also the reason why a lot of US cigar smokers think that Cuban cigars are nothing special. They smoke the odd "Cuban" cigar (nudge, nudge, wink, wink), which in all likeliness was manufactured in Mexico. They are very easy marks, since they don't have a point of reference.
To cut to the cheese: No, you cannot import anything from Cuba except the 100$ limit if you where traveling on a permit.
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
This is not correct. Any developer can license his code under pretty much any license (or even not at all). The nice thing about GPL is that this license model appeals to many people, hence it is widely used.
However, nobody forces you to use GPL (unless you pass on GPLed code oder derivatives thereof).
If anyone mended the GPL so that certain countries oder groups of people were not to be able to license GPL code, I suspect most current GPL code providers would stick to the current GPL version or switch to a different model without the new provisions.
You should rephrase you statement as: This is the "great" thing about the OSS-community, that their software is licensed regardless of ideological differences.
Its funny listening to Americans comment on a country that the vast majority have never been to. Not to mention countries that they are not free to visit should they want to.
Not being American, and therefor being FREE to go where I please, I can tell you that a rum and COKE is not hard to come by. Funny, I thought Coke was an American company?
Looks like the US has a much larger problem with Coke smuggling than they thought.
Haven't any of you sheeple figured it out yet, it is only illegal if you are not a giant corporation. If you have 30 employees and you trade with Cuba, look out, those Southern redneck senators will hunt you down like dogs. If you employ 30,000 employees, and pay of the douchbags on the hill, you can do as you please.
The US policies against Cuba are bad for Cuba, but great for the rest of the world. It has left a Carribean island with great weather, great beaches, great cigars, affordable accomodations and best of all, NO Americans. It's like vacation heaven. Besides, none of you would like it there. Really.
I guest that Haitian would like to change freedom for food.
In general? I doubt it. But then, they always have the choice to vote in a dictator, if they thought he could bring food to the table. They used to be a dictature, so they know what it is like.
I haven't been to Haiti, but all poorstricken ex-dictatures I have been to seem to be happier as free countries, even if they are still poor.
Ha ha - phew that was a good one ...
Next thing you'll be trying to tell us that the US is a real democracy..
If the copies are illegal and thus MS is not profiting off of them. Nobody in Cuba should be able to run Windows Update.
If the copies are legal, then MS Windows Update should check for and disallow any Windows running PCs from Cuba to access and run updates.
I am just saying...
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
gee, thanks for that. But his point was the infrastructure, not your family.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
Fair play, so you are saying that if MS UK breaches US law then MS US would be held accountable. Further, if MS UK breaks UK law, MS UK is accountable to the UK authorities.
To be a bit clearer - you are saying MS UK are subject to both US and UK law. If that is the case then it would seem to me that opening overseas branches of your company (as opposed to just forming new companies on foreign soil and calling them the same name) has some massive legal disadvantages.
I guess you missed the day covering "puppet governments" in high school?
Ask yourself which is a better place to live in Central America if you arn't wealthy, & I mean wealthy by Central American standards (which rules even those on the dole in the west).
Yep lets compare Cuba with Mexico, Post Sandinista Nicaragua, Columbia, Panama & Haiti, etc.
The simple fact that Cuba is a 3rd World Country yet has tertiary education levels & life expectancies that match the US (all while facing a cripling embargo for 2 generations), makes it a Utopian workers paradise by 3rd world standards, no matter how much of a stinking sewer some arrogant 'Sepo' thinks the place is.
Yet the rest of the entire world can still trade with Cuba. Does the embargo have an effect? Sure. Is it enough to ruin the country alone? You've got to be kidding me.
North Korea does also.
Don't forget China, they also have a parliament and a constitution.
What about Iraq under Saddam? Yep, parliament and constitution.
What about Eastern Germany? Yep, parliament and constitution.
And the list goes on and on and on...
Your point was?
Seriously, having a parliament and a constitution doesn't mean anything unless there is democracy and rule of law.
I'm really wondering what intelligent people modded parent up...
As Cuba's sights are not set very high on Wireless connectivity and neither are Linux's... I say they deserve each other,
President who cannot be voted out of office == dictator
America is pretty much the only country not trading with Cuba directly. In spite of that, millions in US currency flow into Cuba every month through indirect routes, including the sizable Cuban population who fled to the US for love of freedom. Overall, Cuba has a national GDP of $33.92 billion, which gives them a far better per-capita than most other countries with similar poverty levels.
The reality simply is that Cuba is run by a corrupt and incompetant military dictator whose only prior qualification was being a spoiled rich kid and lawyer. The complete mismanagement of the economy by his everlasting regime led to scarcity, and the spoils system inherent in any communist regime has led to a disparity whereby most Cubans live in abject poverty, but the priveledged few live in opulant comfort.
Cuba is not even a good example of how a communist ought to be run, but it is an excellent example of how communist governments eventually are run.
Cuba has every right to do that, microsoft only has the right to refuse to sell their software to cuba. Once it enters cuba, it falls under cuban law, and if cuban law says it can be distributed freely, then it can be distributed freely within cuba.
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I'll feed the troll.
Would you say that our "ownership" is simply a privilege granted to us by the state?
-- http://www.cerastes.org
Easy: a carefully constructed legal framework is one of the things, possibly the single most important thing, that keeps Castro in power.
Human rights abuses aside - and ok that's quite an omission - Cuba does remarkably well for itself. Take a look the UN's 2004 Human Development Report Cuba Fact Sheet. If you put this in the context of the US's trade embargo, it's quite impressive.
To those posters who've been to Cuba, and been shocked by the poverty they've seen, here's the full Human Development Index - maybe your next vacation should be to one of the 125 countries lower down the list.
Big G should have shut up when he was saying that Linux is made by communists... They are loosing business because of that now.
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
Fair play, so you are saying that if MS UK breaches US law then MS US would be held accountable.
Actually what I'm saying is if MS UK breaches US law with regard to trade to cuba, MS would be held responsible. These aren't seperate entities, but a larger corporation.
To be a bit clearer - you are saying MS UK are subject to both US and UK law.
No, I'm saying that MS UK is subject to the US laws that govern foriegn officies/subsidiaries. I wouldn't imagine, for instance that MS UK is subject to US Federal minimum wage laws, labor laws, etc.
If that is the case then it would seem to me that opening overseas branches of your company (as opposed to just forming new companies on foreign soil and calling them the same name) has some massive legal disadvantages.
I'm not sure there's really a difference (as far as the law is concerned at least) between opening a branch of a company, and forming a "new" company that you own. I'd be highly surprised if this kind of maneuvering works to get around laws intended to apply to foriegn subsideries, offices, etc of US corporations.
AccountKiller
A visit to Cuba would quickly show you many of those statistics are inaccurate. Most Cubans will tell you the free health care is a joke and infant mortality is low simply because the birthrate itself is low and infanticide is not counted as "low infant mortality".
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Or, more incisively, property is a natural construct of man.
BenCurry.net
You can be a star in Cuba and earn $1000 month probably less or escape to America and get a million dollar signing bonus just because you're Cuban regardless if you have any talent.
Then it's conclusive. Linux is a commmunist operating system afterall.
*cough*
I guess that makes Windows a terrorist operating system, from what I've been hearing about various 'terror network' technologies.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
This'll be a nice selling point for Linux:
"Linux: Prefered by communist loonatics everywhere!"
I can see it now!
I never said otherwise. I simply pointed out the fact that the great thing about the GPL and other OSS licenses was that they are free of such restrictions, as they should be.
Free MacMini
you know i've been to cuba many times now. walked around everywhere. spoke to alot of people. truth is the majority of people love thier country. the majority of people support castro and building socialism. not everyone does of course and that is potrayed here in the US as everbody. I won't go into particulars. Cuba is a poor country. They have old hardware.the overwhelming majority of cubans cannot afford home computers. So what the government currently has and is now putting more money into because of recent better financial times are community computer clubs. this is where people go use a computer, use the internet etc. when i visited these clubs they were all using linux. these were two different clubs in havana i saw. this is part of a broader campaign by the government now that they have some more finanacial stabilty. the money doesn't go into some rich buggers coffers but into social programs like these. including the university for all, which are educational courses taught over T.V.. they print newspaper like textbooks on classes like english,literay critisim etc.. things that don't have some direct economic effect but just raises the cultural level of the country. i can see using linux as an advantage for all the reasons we do here and other third world countries do, including running on older hardware and being free as beer.yes,ideologically it is about one more thing being attached to the US and capitalism in general. that's no secret.
Most likely both...
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I doubt they buy from the american vendors, buying hardware from asian vendors is usually cheaper and there are no sanctions between cuba and asian countries.
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Not that it's particularly important or anything, but I was under the impression Castro stopped smoking his famous cigars some years ago.
Moreover, they'd not be giving anything to anyone. They'd just be releasing some code with a licence for others to use it if they so desired.
No net benefit for Cuba, so no reason it should be covered by embargo.
And in the event that the entire legal establishment loses their collective marbles overnight or gets suddenly borged by bill gates - the patches could always be removed and Linux distribution proceed as normal.
Think about it. How ridiculous does it sound. Or not?
I'm tending toward "ridiculous" myself
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Windows is a poor
OS. Like an MP3,
No Fidel-ity.
nope. There are differences of laws.
Labor laws, for instance...MS-UK doesn't have to follow US labor laws (they could pay $3/hr, for instance...if it was legal in the UK).
There's also export/import advantages. The only things they'd get hit from as far as US laws are concerned are export restrictions. I can't off-hand think of anything else they're bound by at MS-UK, so far as US laws are concerned.
Good point: Why can't Cuba and the U.S. get along? They have so much in common!
BenCurry.net
That's pretty vital to most governments and large organizations, too.
I assume that you meant that as sarcasm, but at least one agency of the U.S. Government uses a game based on the Unreal engine as a recruiting tool.
I guess since the Jews were driven to near extinction by a bunch of luncatics from a country who now professes to be the world's moral leader doesn't affect you since it happened before you arrived on the planet.
I remember watching an interview with Fidel Castro on CNN. Basically, he hates technology as it "corrupts" society as it's bent on capitalism.
Keep in mind Castro is fucking NUTS! He bases everything on irrational ideology to further advance his communist agenda. As far as he's concerned; screw any form of personal achievement as it demoralizes everyone out of equality even if it drags down the quality of life.
Sadly, we have some leftists on Slashdot that look up to him as some form of idol. Hell, I will prove it, just wait and see me get modded down.
Life is not for the lazy.
Hey look everyone, an American is saying negative things about Cuba -- let's believe him! After all, Americans saying negative things about Cuba is so very non-typical of them. Right?
Except MNCs with a US presence. Also, the tourist market for Cuba would be *huge* - seriously, expecting a double-digit percentage point growth in their GDP solely from US tourism is not at all unlikely, were the embarge to end. While the government is a problem, the US embargo is just as much of one (before you argue - I've been there, have you?).
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
You can pay $X for your OS and $Y1, $Y2, $Y3... for your software.
Or if you're a government, you can pay filthy pirates $X/100 for your OS and $Y1/100, $Y2/100, $Y3/100... for your software, especially if the copyright owner is subject to an embargo prohibiting it from enforcing copyrights in your territory. Just make sure not to pay your police force to enforce copyrights.
Or you can pay $0 for Linux and $0, $0, $0... for software, so long as you can live without a few options
If you pay little or nothing for Linux, you still have to pay for new hardware to replace hardware whose manufacturer refuses to cooperate with the free software community.
I completely agree. I am one of those lucky amaericans who HAVE been to Cuba (in 2001). While there I kept thinking to myself
"This is a beautiful country with very nice people...I dread the day that americans invade and ruin a perfectly good thing."
For every nice american travelling, there are at least 3 that act like asses and are ignorant of the culture they are visiting.
Both. Not having partaken when I visited, I don't recall the going rate for either, but it was glaringly obvious what was going on.
For what it's worth, the most desirable jobs for your average Cuban? Tour guide, waiter in restaurants catering to foreign visitors. Nobody in Cuba makes shit for a salary, but the *tips* put them into what would be the top tax bracket.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Now that there is a Open Soruce CAD package that supports calculation of displacement and buoyancy for old tires, its clear why the change was made.
agreed, but it's sad that, when you are thinking the forces of freedom and culture are advancing suddenly the Pentagon decides to take advantage of your *free* software as well (previous slashdot story).
*Not sure whether communism is bad, but american military certainly is*
If you want to know more about what life is really like in Cuba, check out this web page and read about human rights violations:
http://therealcuba.com/
This is also a particularly good time to keep an eye on news coming out of Cuba because tomorrow a large group of dissidents in the island are preparing to meet despite goverment opposition in what they are calling the Assembly to Promote Civil Society.
Others here have mentioned how people are not allowed Internet access. But it doesn't stop there. Books are censored too. People who try to operate private libraries from their homes are often arrested and have had their books confiscated and destroyed.
The stories go on and on. I could tell you about my relatives who were arrested for buying or selling things like meat or car tires. Or my own father who jumped from a moving train to escape his military captors because they were going to make him face a firing squad for handing out anti-Castro propaganda. It amazes me how little of this is known or covered in the news.
Not to be an asshole, but so does North Korea. I like Cuba, I think Castro hs done some good for them but he is is still a dictator.
Given the embargo one wonders where the Cubans got their Winders copies.
Screwing with the US Gummint is one thing, Gates takes no prisoners.
IBM
Its an very real construct of me being stronger than you.
And a group of people being stronger than another group.
The law is nothing more than a written down form of a stance presumably held by the majority, which in most cases is stronger than the minority.
When any of that gets out of whack, property gets lost.
Linux is used by the NSA, CIA, FBI, DOD.
Linux is used by the commies.
FIGHT!
Check with Ry Cooder (musician/producer). He produced a documentary and soundtrack (and perhaps some followups) of Cuban musicians (Buena Vista Social Club), in Cuba. I think one may have gotten an Oscar or Grammy.
What would be the diffence between music/film that was partially developed in Cuba and code that was?
Good for you, there's now a country just 90 miles from the US where you can live your philosophy and use Linux too. See how well it works.
Well, is that a result of communism or the result of embargo from the western world?
We really don't know if communism works as a system. It has not been correctly applied in USSR, failed due to people's greediness, and it has almost failed in Cuba, due to embargo from US.
.sigs: Just Say No!
As a canadian, you are full of sh!t...ROYALLY!
First off, I find it amusing that you wrote the word "sh!t" with an explanation point, as if to try to be polite, yet wrote "FUCKING" in capital letters only 7 words later... but I digress.
OH WAIT! I forgot, you watch our state-run(commie) TV,CBC...so naturally everything is the badbad amerikkans fault, right?
Almost every nation in the world, democratic or otherwise, has a federally opeated broadcaster (The United States being the notable exception; though the United States is also violently capitalist in nature, so that explains that). This isn't communist at all. Either way, I'm doubting your Canadianism; things aren't "state-run" in Canada, they're "crown controlled".
Semantics aside, the word your feeble mind is probably grasping at is "socialist". Of course, "socialism" and "communism" aren't synonyms, despite how many conservative fear-mungerers on Fox News have tried convince you otherwise.
Of course, you may just be parroting the old conservative half-truth that the media is "liberal", in which case you'd be a sheep who isn't really sure what the word "liberal" means, either.
At any rate, the last time I saw the CBC indite the Americans for something morally questionable was .... oh wait.... never. So regardless of what you think about the CBC you don't really have a point at all, do you?
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
I understand whaty you're trying to say here, but real rights are universal. They are not granted by any government. They are granted by the Creator (whether you believe that creator is an evolutionary process, God, extraterrestrials, or whatever). You would be more correct to say that they are not defended universally. A government can try to ignore or supress a natural right, but the right itself does not go away.
---
>Property is an artificial construct of law.
>Intellectual property doubly so.
The law itself is an artificial construct. Saying a particular set of laws is an artificial construct is a tautology.
A doubled tautology is reduntantly uninsightful.
But the real key to why you're so totally wrong is that you think the law came first. Property came first, and the law followed.
Calling property "artificial" using the pseudonym "CommunistTroll" suggests that you think the concept of property is illegitimate. Property is how we reward one another for good behavior.
Without property there would be nothing to work for; there would be no gifts to give, no security in life, no nest for the little missus.
Without property, the tragedy of the commons would be the universal state of being. The weakest would have nothing, while the strongest had everything they wanted to have.
Without intellectual property there would be no authors, no artists, no musicians or filmmakers. They would still be there, creating their art for its own sake, but no one else would know. The world would be an illiterate, grey, dull, dreamless place, except in the strongholds of the most powerful, who would take the non-property of the weak and keep it for themselves.
The need to protect our persons from one another and the concept of property underpin law. So rather than property being an artificial construct of the law, the law is a formalization of the reality of property.
Intellectual property is merely an extension to the beautiful, grand, and clever what the brutish, quick, and powerful already enjoy.
sigs, as if you care.
Could be interesting. I think Linux might really make sense for them. Sure, you can steal MS software, but you can't really put together the necessary MS enterprise infrastructure without buying a lot of stuff from MS and paying a lot of fancy consultants. Linux certainly cuts down on that. I think it would be a smart move for them.
Wrong on that account at least.
Most third world nations (like mine) cannot trade with cuba either because the US sanctions that would apply to us would be a business killing nightmare.
Result:
Canadians have a great commercial corridor because the US cannot impose on them as easyly. So Canadians sell to cuba freely, and very ver expensively, all their technology.
That sucks for:
a) American companies
b) Third world companies
c) Cuba
And rulez for:
Smart, ballsy canadians that dont give a shit of where the US cares to throw their very high and mighty hand.
NO SIG
I know you're a troll, but I'll bite.
Cuba had the lowest malnutrition rate in Latin America from 1979-1992, before the US intensified sanctions. Its estimated number of malnourished as of the report date (2000) was 1.8 million, i.e. ~5%. This is almost completely due to the increased embargo; not being able to buy from the US (its nearest potential supplier) increases costs by about 30%; caloric intake during the time dropped 38%. Even still, for comparison, about 30 million Mexicans (~%28) are malnourished. Who is crying them a river?
As for your "ex-cuban" relatives, you are staring in the face the classic example of "selection bias". If they weren't anti-castro/anti-communist, they wouldn't have fled to the US, now would they?
Freeze Ray. Tell your friends.
Big part of the world (including Canada and Europe) might think that contry ruled by fundamental evangelist christians is politically misaligned.
Canada... Europe... and you can add half of the US to that list as well.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
but despite crushing US sanctions it still manages to give basic health care...
Really?!? How do you know you can trust the statistics that the Cuban government publishes? See for yourself the great healthcare you can get as a Cuban citizen.
* This could be in retaliation for Gates' recent anti-communist remarks
* This could be based on idealogical concerns about whether information can be owned and controlled by individuals/corporations or belongs to the state
* This could be a strategic decision to take future software development "in house" rather than depending on 3rd party developers who are based in a hostile country
* This could be a pragmatic decision based on studies that show that a gradual conversion to Linux now would be better in some ways than the inevitable enforced upgrades to Longhorn / Office2006
This is about cuba not having money to feed children... let alone US pressure to pay licences that would be on use.
This is also about recent approaches by leftist Lula da Silva of Brasil who has the balls to help fellow people of the latin american community, instead of say, starving them to death like the U.S. wants to do.
And mind you. No latin american nation supports Castro, but most latin americans love cubans. I dont know why, its a fetish with us. We are in love with the cuban nation. Not fidel.
So suffice it to say that US is not precisely popular amongst freedom loving latinamericans.
NO SIG
Am I the only one who finds it disturbing that Cuba _actually_ uses Microsoft Windows??! How come? Are those pirated copies? If not, how are they buying legal copies given the economic embargo the USA pushed on them?
I don't feel like it...
We don't buy into the isolationist argument up here, and we don't get our knickers bent out of shape trying to "prove" that communism doesn't work but undermining Cuba at every opportunity.
And Cuba doesn't point Nuclear Missles at you either.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
whoops. my bad. sorry everyone. this is my apology to the community.
take care.
love k3n.
How is a third world dictatorship, where you can't surf the internet without explicit permission from the government, switching to Linux supposed to bring good attention to Linux? Shouldn't this be something that Linux advocates try to downplay?
Next Up: The government of Sudan has endorced Linux - "We wouldn't be able to carry out our genocide of non-muslims without it! We have 3,000,000 corpses to attest to the efficiency of open source software!".
Also in News: The president of NAMBLA announces the growth of Linux use amoung child pornographers. "Windows just isn't secure enough to download kiddie porn without worrying about some police force exploiting a Windows flaw to catch us. Linux is the only OS for hardcore child-porn fanatics!"
Yeah, great... Just when Linux and Open Source software is starting to get good publicity from the press, Linux "Advocates" are now trying to link Linux to totalitarian regimes. With friends like these, who needs enemies!
Anyhow I figure this would be a good place to post why I feel why the U.S still has these sanctions on Cuba. 1) As you call them some old time senators who lived through the cold war and cant get over a grudge, right or wrong 2) How close cuba is to the U.S. If you build a highway from the end of Florida to Cuba, it'll take me longer to drive from one end of long island to the other(long island is where i live) than what it would to drive to florida from cuba and i think having a country you cant control that close still scares alot of officials....
It seems like NetBSD would have been a better choice to install on the hardware available in Cuba. Hopefully they will comply with the GPL and release the changes necessary to make these ports.
(Laugh. It's funny.)
This is conclusive proof that Linux is for commies.
Considering the trade embargo in place, Microsoft can't sell them Windows legally anyway, at least directly.
Considering the number of Cuban radio hams I hear (and work) using PSK31, a computer-based ham radio mode, grassroots computing is alive and well there.
I guess those old Soviet diesel-powered IBM 360 clones are starting to wear out?
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
No, they can't. That would still be illegal, and would result in the same actions against MS-US as MS-US doing it would. Please read the applicable export control laws before commenting with your incorrect crap.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Of course that's very cynical of us all. The original poster may have found true love in Cuba.
If you think this phenomenon is unique to United States citizens, you are sadly mistaken.
Would you say that our "ownership" is simply a privilege granted to us by the state?
You got that exactly right.
In any country in the world, the government has the "right" to take your property, and pay you a price that they determine (which is sometimes zero).
In some countries, the government is up front about this, making it clear in property documents that you are merely granted use of the property until such time as the government wants it.
In others (such as the US), there's a pretense of private ownership. But when the government wants your property, they simply take it by "eminent domain" (google for it), and it's no longer yours. You have no recourse, unless you have the funds to bribe the right people.
You can talk all you like about property being yours. But it's just a nice social myth, belied by the actions of your own government.
A few years ago, there was a notorious case in Detroit. The city grabbed a big chunk of land by eminent domain, kicked out the people, tore down the houses - and sold it to an auto manufacturer for a price below market rates. This taught a lot of Americans just what "private property" really means to them. Some of us still remember it.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Check with Ry Cooder (musician/producer). He produced a documentary and soundtrack (and perhaps some followups) of Cuban musicians (Buena Vista Social Club), in Cuba. I think one may have gotten an Oscar or Grammy.
What would be the diffence between music/film that was partially developed in Cuba and code that was?
He probably did it under a US government permitted cultural exchange program. Code exported to the US might be viewed differently.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I tend to favour the evolutionary process as creator. The problem with this is that then right and wrong can only be defined in terms of what is good or bad for a society (culture of violence bad, doing your job good, that sort of thing). Rights are just those privileges that we've managed to wrest en masse from whatever authorities have set themselves up, and inalienable rights are just those that we're really keen not to let go of.
Unless you're a strong believer in Plato's forms, these concepts don't have any existence in and of themselves any more than the hypothetical pages of work that I should be producing now do.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
you know what is better... I've been modded reduntant, offtopic, etc. Not that I care too much but anyway, thanks for the translation, I just wanted to test what would happen =oP
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
Why no links to the pictures of the aforementioned Cuban ladies?
I find laziness to be an excellent motivator.
"cite" taken...
That's not the point. I realize anyone can use it. I just don't particularly care if Cuba uses it. It doesn't exactly provide any ammo in our case for OSS adoption, that's my point. Besides, I don't want to bridge the gap between us unless it's a real bridge...leading to the new territory acquired by my government or a new democracy ready to adopt other basic technologies of the 20th...19th century.
because it's illegal for US companies to sell to Cuba (very stiff penalties).
And yet, American companies sell to Cuba all the time, often from a Canadian or other non-American subsidy.
Sprint was running communication likes from Miami to Cuba 20 years ago. Still do to my knowledge.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
How much longer can one man live? Seriously.. i thought the current policy re: cuba was,
1. Wait for Castro to die naturally
2. ?
3. Normalize relations with the new cuban government.
Whatever loophole they use could not last long.. maybe a decade or two at most assuming health care in cuba is as good as they say it is.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Cuba would be wealthy once again if we were able to buy their sugar, tobacco, rum, beer, and other goods. (The beer there is good too! Bucanero all the way.) Not only that, but there would be more of an influx of doctors, lawyers, skilled farmers, skilled machinists (to keep things working in Cuba, you need to be good) and other professionals coming from Cuba.
Bucanero was alright; Cristal was piss, though. There was a third one I liked very much, but I can't remember the name. But yes, there's quite a bit of skilled trade in Cuba, including some specialties more or less wanting in the rest of the world (e.g. they have a number of people trained in reworking marble that's been attacked by semi-tropical conditions, because of all the old buildings they've worked to restore) and general education in Cuba is very high. Without the embargo, Cuba would likely be doing a lot better. Not well, necessarily, but significantly better.
I didn't like Veradero. Then again, when I was there, there were storms and I was sick, so I didn't exactly get the best of it.
I guess the only thing left to do is to wait for the old man to die, then see what happens after that.
Hope that Raul dies first; he's the likely successor, and he has none of Fidel's good qualities; he's a thug, pure and simple.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
The great counter-example: Microsoft and their infamous Word EULA, stating that the software may not be used to write anything critical of Microsoft. Once you start down the road of "you can't use my software unless you think exactly like me," where does it stop?
<Yoda Voice>
Dark Side that way lies!
</Yoda Voice>
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
I think the 46 years of blockade, economic warfare, and *military attacks* put paid to that debt a while ago, myself.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Good catch, pointing out that technicality. It's too easy to fall into the US-law-is-world-law trap. (Because it so often is.) But I can do you one step further. It's only up to Cuban copyright law (those who write the law actually) to decide whether you *must* pay Microsoft to use copies of their software. Not whether you *should* or not. I think you've fallen into the Government-law-is-moral-law trap. (Perhaps because it sometimes is?)
If aspiration is a virtue, achievement cannot be a vice.
You can have that money right after you give the Native American's their land back.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Ruins of the sort that exist in Cuba indicate that there was once prospeerity, and it was squandered.
This is a much different situation than in the other parts of the world. The Favelas in Rio, for instance, are much different.
Cuba had a healthy inheritance, and it was squandered by the Communists.
Big difference.
D
But it is against Canadian law for an American company to discipline Canadian employees for violating American trade sanctions.
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
Property is an artificial construct of law.
Intellectual property doubly so.
Absolutely. Now to buy myself some lunch...
One good turn - gets all the covers.
I saw plenty of brand new Volvo tour busses, and Audi rental cars, amidst the tired old Soviet cars and the even older American ones.
A Toblerone chocolate cost exactly the same in a Cuban store that it does in the US. Of course this mean the overwhelming majority of Cubans can't afford them.
I didn't get the impression that our sanctions were hurting them as much as their system of government. Once you've seen how things really work, you'd have no doubt that it's their system much more than sanctions that's holding them back.
D
I thought under the Helms-Burton act trading with Cuba was illegal. So how can the Cubans have Windows on their PCs without M$ being prosecuted?
I don't know about the GP, but I personally can see how ownership is an artificial construct. Why does this land belong to me, other than the fact that it is currently in my possession and I have a piece of paper that says so?
Ownership is a legalism that has no meaning without the appropriate laws. It's not really a privilege so much as the government created the institution of ownership in the forging of the social contract that makes the government legitimate.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
don't start that bs again.
Just because it's the only recent example of one people taking over a land that was inhabited by another people means nothing. It's the only one in recent history that people can, for some reason, blame the USA for and get away with it.
If we had examples of other countries like the people of britian BEFORE the "britians" formed a country people would decry them as well, but since it's so long ago no one even cares. And that's my attitude about the natives... myself haveing a LOT of my own ancestory with them.
The fact of the matter is, every people before the land they occupied became a country/territory as we see it today, was simply "owned" by someone else before them. Wars, countries uniting and dissolving were and will always be a fact of history.
Now quit the rant about the Native Americans. They had their chance and time to rule over this continent... now it is ours for the next thousand years or so.
As far as I understand from the Office of Foreign Assets, via the US Treasury, and is the office that manages the trade embargo against Cuba - is that it is only illegal to spend American dollars there.
You can actually visit Cuba, that's legit, you just cannot spend dollars there.
But anyway - there isn't anything (AFAIK) wrong with importing Cuban art/culture/music/literature back to the USA, as long as dollars weren't spent on the transfer. Just as there are tons of latino bands using Cuban influences in their music, playing Cuban songs, there should be no problem with patches to Linux submitted by a Cuban.
First reply to my post claimed that the low infant mortality in Cuba is explained by low birth rate and, kid me not, infanticide.
And here are you refering to a "free domain" site containing unsubstansiated picures claiming to be from Havana hospital.
Gee, only uneducated simpletons will believe that.
As long as the reseller has no US operations, and MS didn't sell it to the reseller explicitly to be sold on to Cuba, and had no knowledge of the end user destination, yes, MS could do this.
(Interestingly, this is why arms manufacturers require an end user certificate for sale of weapons - to prevent their weapons being found in an opposing armies hands'. Although it can't eliminate the problem, it's a method of minimizing it for those in situations where your customers are limited in number and the possible legal ramifications of an error are high.)
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
Fabulous pictures, I so wish I could go, and smoke cigars, drink whatever they've got, and enjoy some interesting music. What a stupid waste that being a US consumer, I can't go and visit one of our friendly neighbors. Kinda looks like Pittsburgh, a little bit.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
A country can have both a president and a dictator. For instance, the Soviet Union in the 1970s, had president Nicolai Podgorny, and dictator Leonid Brezhnev. Any truly democratic republic has a president and not a dictator. A truly democratic monarchy has neither president nor dictator. The combination of dictator without president, however, isn't very common because, as you pointed out, any dictator that wishes to survive for long ends up in calling himself "Our Popular and Beloved Democratically Elected President" or something to the effect.
I am a US citizen who has been to Cuba twice. I made a website about each visit, but they're both currently down, so I'll have to paraphrase.
The second time, I spent the better part of a day at a computer center in Havana. Almost no one can afford a computer there (much like the rest of Latin America, though their education and medical care are far better than the rest of Latin America). The state provides computer centers in every major city and a lot of the smaller ones as well. You have to sign up several days in advance, but then you get four uninterrupted hours to use your computer.
The software is top of the line stuff - Windows XP, Photoshop, MS Office (I know, I know, Office isn't top of the line, but you see my point), all in Spanish, and people were comfortable with it. I asked how they got the software, and the answer was "It's downloaded from the web."
Cubans are allowed and even encouraged to use email and IM... inside Cuba. They have a state-of-the-art fiber optics system from one end of the island to the other, connecting both universities and public computer centers. Contrary to popular belief, sending email out of Cuba is not forbidden... but it must be paid for in US dollars (that may have changed to euros since then, I don't know), so very few people do. The prohibition is not political, but economic. It's a digital divide, Cuba's heterodox economy notwithstanding.
Can the Cuban government read its people's mail? Probably. Can the US government? Probably.
Cuba does several other things that may be of interest to Slashdot readers. One is that the computer center I visited (mind you, I walked in alone and unannounced) took me on a tour of their classrooms - one for hardware and two for software, all completely free. The other is that they have an entire room of computers (eight or ten) set aside for the blind, with both Braille and speaking interfaces.
As for why they would switch to Linux, TFAs are light on details, or for that matter, information of any kind. My guess is that it's not freedom (they do what they want with it) or price (they're not paying for it). My guess is they don't want to use a US product when there's another option. I suspect they've been talking to Lula about this.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
One of the things that amazes me about Cuba is how much they do with so little. While Cubans live in poverty and the Cuban government is cash straped they do have lower infant mortality and a higher literacy rate than the US which is the wealthiest nation in the world. Some parts of their system do seem to work better than ours. Many argue that the average Cuban is better off today than they were before the revolution. Under Batista the vast majority of Cubans lived in poverty as well. While I'm still on my soapbox I'd point out that American opposition to Cuba has nothing to do with Democracy or freedom; we have supported far worse despots than Castro. Our problem with Castro is economic ideology or Capitalism vs. Socialism not Democracy vs. Despotism.
You don't need to guess. Go to Haiti, which is an hour flight from Cuba and is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere (without a communist "dictator" and a US embargo). Or visit some of the former USSR republics and look how they "prosper" without senile communist dictators.
Abandoning socialism for free market capitalism doesn't work by itself. On the contrary, it destroys economies and condemns millions of people to poverty. It's not a popular subject and is certainly not covered by the business media in depth, but if you check out statistics even for the relatively successul Easter European countries, you would be surprised to see the changes from the socialist times.
If the transition is accompanies with billions of dollars in investment, then the economy may grow fine, like it happened in, say, Estonia. But the negative impact of privatisation and destruction of welfare systems can be too much to compensate with that growth.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
They can and should, to be true to the embargo, disallow access from the block of IP addresses assigned to Cuba.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Well I'm glad you conceited snobs enjoy the embargo while the people of Cuba suffer because of it. The embargo severely cripples the Cuban economy, but hey, let's keep those people in poverty just so a few snobs like yourself can vacation on the Island free of American influences.
Perhaps you're not aware that not only can the USA not trade with Cuba under the embargo, but any international vessel that trades with Cuba cannot trade with the USA on that same trip. So if you are trading anything, you will aim most of your travels to the USA, because the Cuban imports/exports will not add anythign appreciable.
You may love keeping the embargo intact so you can take small vacations there like the conceited snob you are, but Cubans have alot of difficulty buying everyday necessities such as medicines, light bulbs, automobile parts, etc because of it.
You may love great beaches and cigars, which explains your reasons for going. When I (a US citizen) went we brought tens of thousands of dollars worth of medicines that US hospitals were disposing because they were just past their expiration date (but still good for all intents and purposes). The hospitals we visited were extremely gracious for this, medicines are really in short supply there because of the embargo.
You may like not dealing with Americans travelling in your little vacation paradise, but most cities are poorly lit, with only every 3 or 4 streetlights on. I thought at first this was to save electricity, but it's because they have a very short supply of light bulbs they can get through the embargo.
You may love the antique cars still driving around (with ridiculous amounts of air pollution), but Cubans have tough times getting automobile parts through the embargo. That's why they still have many old cars from before the embargo was placed. They have tough times not only buying new cars but even replacement parts for old cars. But hey, let's keep them in this state just so you can go and visit this quaint island.
It's funny how you dislike Americans so much, yet you're in reality far worse than the average American you despise so much.
And in arguing that, you accept that Castro and his revolutionaries had a right to take the American owned land in Cuba away from the US. Lets face it he had far more justification, what him actually being Cuban and all.
I have lived for a number of years in America, though, and my experience is that ordinary citizens there aren't afraid of their government(s) in the same way that they are in Cuba.
Back a dozen or so years ago, I was in the California National Guard (D Co, 1/149 Armor) We got called up for the LA riots following the Rodney King beating trial, and got shipped to Rampart, one of the worst places in LA.
I got thanked multiple times by the locals for being there. Not for stopping the riots- we were too late for that since much of our patrol area was a smoldering ruin.
We were being thanked for protecting the locals from police reprisals. They didn't feel safe when there was a police officer nearby, and for very good reason.
There are certainly people in America who fear (parts of) their government.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Actually, that appears to no longer be the reason for the embargoes. It is all about keeping in power... Think about it, how many Cubans have fled to the US, because they hated Castro? A sizeable number, I think there are about a million of Cuban origin there, and they all want to keep on punishing Castro with these sanctions. They will vote for whoever is most against Cuba. Now where exactly are they? Well, they couldn't have gone far, so what is the closest state to Cuba... why, Florida! Now can anyone name a state where a million undecided voters really, REALLY matters?
And if not for communists, these nice buildings would still be occupied by nice friendly rich people. And all poor people would be somewhere away from them. Please don't say that Cuba had prosperity, it didn't. The only difference is that there was a class of plantation owners, fabricants and the like and now there isn't.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
It worked in USSR rather well, despite being "incorrectly applied" and stuff. But people always find something to moan about. Can you believe that in 1980s about 40% of the Soviet people claimed that they didn't drink enough milk, despite per capita milk consumption being 50% higher than in the US?
Pussies. They believe the lies that once they get rid of communism, every one will live like they do in Holliwood movies. Guess what, after the national economy was "privatized" millions of people were instantly impoverished.
Communism actually does work, but there is too much opposition to the idea in the West for it to be tried soon. A random American pisses boiling water when you mention communism to him. Still, the more advanced our technologies become, the more promising socialist and communist models become. Open source is just one example.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Coca Cola in Cuba is imported from Mexico
There was a story about it a good year or so ago on NPR. I don't recall what the exact charge was, but it was pretty hefty.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
The largest validator of the parent posts point is that all of us are speculating, because no one from Cuba is on the internet to affirm or deny our inferences. That is enough of a statement to make me believe the quality of life is less than it should be.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
Ever hear of the Prime Directive from Star Trek? The one industry that brings in the most money in Cuba is the Tourist Industry, where the people have direct contact with visiting tourists. That's why I refused to give our bus driver a tip, like the other Americans I went with wanted to, because it promotes the classification, or basically introduces corruption into the economy that otherwise wouldn't have been there.
So Congratulations for increasing the corruption of the people.
Regarding hotels - where did you stay? My girlfriend and I shared a room in two hotels, there were no problems whatsoever with this. Perhaps you were soliciting prostitutes (as per your comment in the first paragraph)? Maybe you didn't even realize that some women would sleep with you if you bought them dinner or some other relatively cheap things (cheap for you). And this type of behavior, of you interfering with the Cuban economy and stratifying it) is what they don't want. Prime directive.
Regarding the internet - you are right at fancy hotels the internet is expensive (at $3 per hour or whatever). But people there CAN and DO use the internet, I've communicated with several Cubans through it. And these are REAL Cubans I've met on the streets of Havana, people I've gone up to first, not people that came up to me.
Your collection of pictures is nice and also misleading, when I was last there about 2 years ago there were many buildings under renovation in that same area. I didn't see a single nice building in your photoes, leading me to doubt your sincerity. But the majority of the problem with homes is with the embargo - building materials are in very short supply.
You are right that some pro-Cuba tours get shown only the nice areas of Cuba, and similar some anti-Cuba tours get shown only the bad areas of Cuba.
But in any case the embargo is totally unethical, severely hurts the people of Cuba, and is an antiquated relic of the cold war. We trade with other communist countries, such as China and Viet Nam, so that argument is BS. People try to flee Mexico as and other countries to the US, so that argument that Cubans flee Cuba is also BS. Castro's regime of course has many problems, as does any government on the planet. But in light of such hostility of the embargo Cuba does pretty good.
Would it help if you saw that the source of these photos is a legitimate news source? Probably not. It comes down to who *you* want to believe. If you want to believe what Castro and his govermnent say about their heathcare system, that is fine with me. Don't call me a "simpleton" just because I don't. That sort of ad hominem attack does not change the fact that not all the evidence points to a health care paradise in Cuba.
Blame all the poverty on the political opposers.
Claim all the good stuff achievements.
It worked for Castro, it worked for Chavez, it worked for Bush.
So lemme see if i get this straight? Its better to live in a war torn nation with the possability of dying every day, living in substandard conditions and starving slowly every day than to live in a communist country. Its easy to say here, in an office, or a house or your car or wherever you are in your clothing which was made by an asian who makes 1/1000th of what you make a year, that its better to live in haiti than in a communist nation but until you've lived that life you really cant comment on it.
Cuba pointed nuclear missiles at the US once, 40 years ago. The US still has them pointed at cuba, and has actually used nuclear weapons in anger.
I am trolling
I can't believe you. You're saying that all these things are in short supply because of a US embargo. Yet the Cubans got several VERY EXPENSIVE missile systems didn't they?
Yet you want us to believe they can't get lightbulbs? That cubans are sooo stupid, they cant make a lightbulb?
I suggest Cuba doesn't have lightbulbs because Castro doesn't want them to have lightbulbs.
Wadda you think of that little piece of logic?
I say that the Cubans can make bulbs, but soon, about a week later, they'll figure out how to get along without Mr. Castro and his ilk. And Mr. Castro and pals would NOT like that very much.
They Live, We Sleep
You're sure being embargoed wouln't have anything to do with becoming less wealthy?
I am trolling
> I can tell you that a rum and COKE is not hard to come by. Funny, I thought Coke was an American company?
When I was in Cuba, I was served "TuKola" all the time. It came in red cans,
similar to Coke, but it wasnt Coke.
Of cause you will deny all that I have said, saying that I have a warped view of history, am an anti-american zealot or that I have my head full of conspiricy theories. But why do you say this? Because you too have been brainwashed by your government. But condemn the Cubans for it. You somehow have been convinced that your government is conducting a rightious crusade against the ideology of the corrupt ledership and liberating the people from tyranny, when really all it is doing is robbing medicine and food from the people when the corrupt ledership can still get whatever they want. Your told that America is the country of freedom and honesty while Cuba is the country of propaganda and lies when in reality it is your government that calls Cubans to defect yet turns them back in the water. America is in an indefensable position here, Castro may be a brutal dictator and a warped propagandist but whatever harm Castro has done to Cuba, America has easily done triple.
Cuba is not evil, Cuba is just another country with it's own stupid ideas that will get it nowhere. The Cuban government does not deserve placation either. However what Cuba needs is a little bit of compassion for the innocent people who are being hurt by America's oppression of them. America is not evil either, but what America is doing to Cuba is far more evil than placating Pol Pot or Edi Amin or any evil person who has ever walked.
Blindly patriotic Americans may mod me down all they like, but for every -1 I get, that's another demostration of how widespread this brainwashing is.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Ok, all you high and mighty people, pointing out that Cuba (rightly) can set it's own copyright laws, and choose to recognise what they wish, the are a signator of WIPO (as pointed out up-thread). Also, just because US corporations can't sell to Cuba, distributors/suppliers elsewhere can (hey, how else would they get CPU's, once again, look up-thread).
Now, hands up here everyone that's read copyright/patent law, ok, and how many of you know that the US government is exempted from any copyright/patent that it wishes to use? Yep, that's right, Uncle Sam has no requirement to respect the intellectual property they recognise, and can use it for their own means. This isn't to imply in any way that they do, but the loophole is sitting right there.
It's just as likely that Cuba buys their software and hardware legitimately, though non-US suppliers, all because of a couple of Senators that have a bug up their collective ass about property expatriation back in 1957.
Do the actions of the U.S. against Chile in 1970 justify the means used by Castro against his own people since before that time (1959) up till this day?
Are you saying that you tolerate or even support the curbing of basic freedoms and human rights in Cuba because those things are necessary?
Are you saying that Castro is justified in ignoring the rights in the constitution he himself had rewritten (i.e. Varela petition with 10000 signatures was ignored and the leaders imprisoned)?
Are you saying that some dictatorships are justifiable because keeping a single leader in power for 46 years is the only way for smaller countries to defend their interests?
Please use your press freedoms to denounce U.S. mistakes if you want, but please don't use them to help a loathsome government justify denying them to its own people. Such things are unnecessary and unjustifiable, and none of us should be supporting the curbing of basic freedoms anywhere, and much less for 46 years.
Property is an artificial construct of law.
So is murder. What's your point?
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Well I'm glad you conceited snobs enjoy the embargo while the people of Cuba suffer because of it. The embargo severely cripples the Cuban economy, but hey, let's keep those people in poverty just so a few snobs like yourself can vacation on the Island free of American influences.
As if the American-imposed embargo has no influence in Cuba. You talk about it as if it were a natural disaster. If you are so concerned about the effects of the embargo on the Cuban people, why not call for lifting it?
Access to moral high road: DENIED.
You may love keeping the embargo intact...
His country doesn't embargo Cuba. He is free to travel there. His country trades with Cuba. Unlike you and me, and our country, the co-called "Land of the free" (just so long as you line up with official policy).
It's funny how you dislike Americans so much, yet you're in reality far worse than the average American you despise so much.
If you're a typical American, he has good reason to. You just blamed him for what we've been doing. People usually find cause for offense in that.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Still, the more advanced our technologies become, the more promising socialist and communist models become.
It's a nice idea, but until you have very cheap, safe, and efficient fusion reactors and probably fairly smart robots don't even bother trying. As long as shortages and rationing come into play human nature takes over. If you could eliminate such things (say you could flood the Sahara with desalinated water from the ocean with real fusion reactors) then there are some interesting possibilities. But trying to enforce them on a shortages-based society is always going to fail.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
I wonder if Cuba repects/would respect the GPL?
True genius is grasping a situation like a peice of fruit, and peircing it just right so that it drains dry.
Cuba's a pretty closed country. Something that's "well known" may well be well known because it's propaganda from the Cuban government we are asked to take on faith. The absence of other voices causes it to be believed.
The Soviet Union, during their times of worst famine, managed to convince a New York Times reporter named Walter Duranty that all was well, and he wrote glowing articles saying that the Soviet Union was the hope and future of all mankind.
Just because "it's well known" doesn't mean it's true. Now, it doesn't mean it's false, either, but as an argument, saying something is well known is about as valid as saying we should trust Microsoft's views that using their software is cheaper than Linux, because they've commissioned research saying it is.
D
The Cuban computers I saw were woefully out of date, with truly ancient versions of Windows on display.
Wait.. how is it you can computers that can run '98 decently but you can't get a car made after the Edsel?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
As someone with no real knowledge or opinions of Cuba until reading this whole discussion, I find it worrying that you fail to even acknowledge those horrible photos.
Is there something wrong with rich people, as compared to Communist party functionaries who had the pull to get oceanfront homes?
And is there something about poor people that makes them inherently good and deserving? Those who strive to improve themselves become rich people in the US and Communist Party functionaries in Cuba. In my book, those who strive to improve themselves are the people who deserve a better life, inherently.
The only difference is that Communist party functionaries had huge amounts of power over microscopic aspects of people's lives, and in turn other people have power over microscopic parts of their lives. That's a terrible way to live, and that's a major reason why Communism failed as a system.
I'd like to encourage you to visit Cuba for yourself, unfiltered. Walk to the streets and talk to the people. Don't take tours; visit the place and see what it's really like. It will be an eye opener, and you might even change your mind on a few things.
D
I'm glad we agree on something! :)
It is just that I am tired of hearing people say that healthcare in Cuba is so great when it is not. Is it better than most "third world" countries? Sure! But I wouldn't brag about it either. Most recent exiles (as well as Cubans still on the island brave enough to speak their mind) will tell you the same.
For example, one thing that people praise about healthcare in Cuba is the relatively low rate of AIDS infections. But their methods of locking up AIDS patients would be unacceptable in the "western world."
"acknowledge those horrible photos"? I "acknowledge" the human suffering portraided by those photos. Next time you buy a toy to your child (if you have any), be rest assured that there is much suffering in the sweat shop that prodiced that toy. Will you "acknowledge" that as well?
Remember that part were the Cylons have gotten copies of all the militaries computer code, and they disable the military and wipe out the human race in a surprise nuclear attack?
Now replace Cylons with "Chinese" and human race with "America"
Microsofft has given the chinese government windows source code. The US military uses windows.
And apparently Cuba has gotten the message.
I dont do meaning of life questions.
I'm not an American, and the site I linked to is an international human rights organization based out of Germany.
It's amazing how talking about Cuba raises a minor army of irrationally off-topic anti-Americans.
I "acknowledge" the human suffering portraided by those photos.
..." is an acknowledgement of the awful state of the hospital in the photos.
I don't see how saying "It's well known that Cuba has, for the region, a decent basic health care
Next time you buy a toy to your child (if you have any), be rest assured that there is much suffering in the sweat shop that prodiced that toy. Will you "acknowledge" that as well?
I have no problem acknowledging that bad stuff goes down in sweatshops. And I agree that I am often hippocritcal to be buying things made in those sweatshops.
I respect your right to opine as you do, and I hope you will find it in you to respect mine to disagree.
The word "right" in this context is frequently misused. For instance, no one has a "right to employment," other than self-employment (forcing me to employ someone steps on a real right -- that of my basic freedom to enter into agreements only with those I choose). Rights are not privileges. Looking at a right as a privilege that has been wrested from "the authorities" (whatever that is) leads to a dangerous and inaccurate sense of impotence. What authority gives, authority can take away. Nothing is inalienable according to this way of thinking. We are all powerless slaves that have to go begging for privileges from the master. Authoritarianism depends on this kind of thinking.
Whoever, or whatever the Creator is, government it is not. Government did not create man. Man created government. The creation cannot be greater than the creator. Government, in a primordial form, arises when groups of people with common interest band together for their common good. Authoritarian rule only emerges later when opportunists take advantage of this, manipulating the masses (typically with generous doses of fear) into surrendering their innate power to these artificial authority figures. Again, this top-down order of things is not natural. You can outlaw something like speaking freely, but you cannot take away man's natural ability to do so. Even within the most repressive of regimes there has typically existed a very active underground where the true nature of man is able to continue despite terrible opposition.
I will end by quoting Ghandi -- not because I think you or anyone should give unquestioning heed to the words of a popular historical figure, but because his feelings on this matter seem to be much in line with my own, and he was able to express himself better than I ever could:
When it comes right down to it, the "master" needs the slave. The slave does not need the master. The "master" is the one who effectively has to come begging to the "slaves" for privileges. Not the other way around. Without the support of the masses (direct or through cunning), the tyrant is powerless. This is why killing all the "slaves" is ultimately not an option. Any authority held by "the authorities" has its' end the moment the masses refuse to recognise it. It is illusory.
No matter what steps are taken, my free will cannot be taken from me. Freedom is inherent in my very nature. It is inalienable. It is a right.
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why shouldn't you? now if this doesn't give our government more reason to hate cuba I don't know what will... yes, our government loves microsoft for all good things they have done for our country (monopolies leading to fines, jobs, etc...)
The point being, people have this image of Castro as a champion of the proletariat. Most people know nothing about him. He is a consumate politician.
Did you know you have to be either a member of the communist party or a foreigner to access the Internet in Cuba?
Amazing...
You are citing statistics which coincide with the end of the cold war, not just a change in the sanctions regime. Sanctions, as usual, have not accomplished the task, at some point, force will be necessary. :)
I'm not going to accuse you of lying, because I think doing so is pretty amateurish. You have misrepresented the cause of your statistics.
It could very easily be attributable to the lack of support provided by the USSR, not the sanctions.
This is the typical leftist unthinking outrage, of course, so I wouldn't expect facts to stop you.
Yes, he did. The book cited in that link was written in 1989. The first reference to Lenin's use of the phrase "useful idiots" in Western culture appeared in Nazi propaganda in 1938. The propaganda film 'Auf der Kommunischt' showed footage of Lenin, and quoted him as referring to the peasants as 'useful fools [idiots]' who did not understand communism. The Nazi's were ardent anti-bolsheviks.
Why am I not suprised (or impressed) by your complete lack of understanding of capitalism, or democracy.
I think that there is a general understanding even here in the US that the sanctions on Cuba are both counterproductive and implimented in such a way as to hurt the generally innocent Cuban civillians. I think that most Americans would favor more trade with Cuba. The problem instead however is that the ages of the past seem to lie like a nightmare on the present, and what was once a cold-war imperial policy (the Cold War was an imperial chess game between two cultural and political empires, IMO).
See here is the problem: During the Cold War, the US implimented a policy of helping Cubans who didn't much like Castro immigrate to the US, where they now make up an indispensible voting block on one of the most important states (Florida). In doing so, we have essentially imported Castro's oppoisition to the US, where they are now a formitable force. Sort of a tail wagging the dog....
So now, anyone with presidential aspirations cannot afford to alienate this group. So while we can pursue free trade with China (which seems to be helping to force them to transform their economy to more of a market one), it is politically impossible to do this with Cuba.
Furthermore, lets look at this idea of placating evil. I have only a few names to mention: Joseph Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, Ho Chi Minh.... Each of these people have either been close US allies or CIA operatives. With friends like these, who needs enemies? Just like the Germanic tribes and the Romans, only former allies can beat the world's largest superpower. We saw that with Vietnam, and we may be seeing that today with Iraq.
Today, things are probably a little better, but we still see issues with the regimes of countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia in terms of systematic oppression of their peoples. Yet these are still our current allies. China was left off the list because I don't think that they are really being seen as an ally at the moment. So I ask again, with friends like these who needs enemies?
Interestingly if oyu look at Africa, those countries which during the cold war associated themselves with the USSR are now further in their transition to democracy than those dictatorships that the US propped up. Sometimes I think that we are our own worst enemy in these regards.
Our embargo of Cuba is an anacronism, and a relic of days gone by which has unfortunately institutionalized itself. Free trade is the one weapon we could use with impunity against Castro and which his government could not withstand. Yet it is off the table because it is seen as placating him.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
He is one of the most articulate politicians of the last century. You may fully disagree with him, but you can't challenge much his consistency.
He is educated and cultivated, when he talks to friends he prefers to talk about literature, poetry and movies than about politics. He would put to shame most other world politicians on a debate or discussion, and very often does when given a chance.
His ideology may be unrealistic but it is not irrational. Christianity is also irrational but follows a dogma. In general nobody calls the pope nuts for this reason.
The failure to encourage Cuba to become a democracy has a lot to do with the underestimation of the capacity of Fidel Castro as a politician.
Cuba would perhaps be a democratic country today if successive US goverments would have treated Fidel Castro as the able politician he is and offered him a dignified way out of his isolationism.
The US have done so with far worst dictators.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That doesn't change the fact that food prices are 30% higher due to the sanctions, which means that being allowed to import from the US would provide 30% more food for the same amount of money, almost eliminating the change in caloric consumption - *and* the fact that even in their present state, Cubans are better off than many, if not most, Latin American nations when it comes to malnutrition.
As an example: Cubans eat a large portion of their calories from rice. Currently, they import most of their rice from Europe, which has to be shipped across the Atlantic. Yet, some of the cheapest rice in the world is grown in Texas, right nearby. It's things like this that make food have an effective "embargo surcharge" in Cuba. Incidentally, it hurts US farmers at the same time.
Freeze Ray. Tell your friends.
The UK forgave the US. Why can't the US forgive Cuba?
I make a reasonable middle-class wage by going to work and not spamming blogs with scams.
In theory subsidiaries of any company trading in the US should not trade with Cuba.
In practice they trade but simply are not necessarily forced to report back to the main office in the US (there are I am sure many legal and accounting tricks to facilitate this).
In a company I used to work for (whose HQ are in the US) we , completely legally under Mexican law, used to sell services to Cuba.
Also many small time business people export goods to Cuba from the Yucatan peninsula (computers included).
The emargo is there, but is a bit porous.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Oh, and as to your "force will be necessary" comment: exactly how long are you expecting Castro to live? We're not talking about Lazarus Long here :P
I also note how you simply assume that all Cubans want him gone - not a realistic assumption. It's that same sort of logic that led to the Iraq mess (BTW - Cuba has more people than Iraq, albeit there is less weaponry in the country).
Freeze Ray. Tell your friends.
You know, there is at least one other possible explanation for the increase in malnutrition. The pdf you link to from the UN has Cuba's proportion of undernourished going from 3% to 19% in measured period 1990-92 and 95-97. Could the increase have anything to do with Cuba's patron state (USSR) collapsing at the end of 91?
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Doesn't really matter to me. I don't like the embargo, I actually think Cuba is small and close enough to be liberated through trade and contact rather than sanctions. I would like nothing better, in fact, than to see thousands of americans go to cuba and pass out books, radios, dollars, etc to the black underclass of Cuba. This would probably piss off (and weaken) Castro more than the sanctions.
It gets to the real problem I have with Cuba, however, which is that it is a totalitarian state. Ok, Cuba has free health care (though the health care offered to non-privileged (ie black and not politically connected) is not the sort of health care you or I would want. See the pics at http://www.captainsquartersblog.com/mt/archives/0
In Cuba, however, you can be arrested for having a n opinion, imprisoned for being homosexual, and executed because you wish to escape.
You said "If they weren't anti-castro/anti-communist, they wouldn't have fled to the US". That seems to imply that people came here because they didn't like Castro. Sort of. People had to flee because they would be killed! That's like saying (notice how I am carefully avoiding Godwin's law) that you shouldn't take East German refugees seriously because they only left because they didn't like the government. Fleeing to avoid the execution of your family strikes me as a pretty reasonable motive for carrying a grudge. That may be selection bias, but the selecting is being done by castro.
http://metapundit.net
No other nationality gets this special treatment. Haitians fleeing death squads get sent back to machine guns: because that dictatorship is run by our evil bastard.
When I lived in South Florida, and before I broke up with my ex (note: she was cuban), she'd have the spanish language TV (from Miami) playing and they would interrupt programs to show immigration racing cubans to the shoreline with commentary. Kind of like the LA stations showing car chases from their helicopters.
Nice presumptious response. I have been very active the past few years to end the embargo, I don't know why you would assume I haven't.
What are thoes guys? Communists?!?
Fidel is only holding on to life out of spite for the US. Within 6 months of the embargo dropping, either he will drop dead, or we will find out he died and was stuffed decades ago.
Pot, kettle, etc.
The US has cajoled with far worst dictators than Castro (Mobutu of Zaire, Suharto of Indonesia, Hussein of Irak, Pinochet of Chile, the aprtheid regime in South Africa).
Nobody, and here I mean nobody, has any moral high ground from where to lecture other people.
Embargoes have consistently probed that only harm the plain people, so poor sods get hit by the dictator and then they get some more from the kind US goverment trying to "liberate" them, in the meantime the elites in both places enjoy life to the fullest.
Wakey, wakey, wakey!
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
when you saw the topic and thought Cuba = Cuba Gooding Jr. I was like, how is this /. worthy? A famous actor actually is using Linux? ;p
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The original poster apparently enjoys the embargo because it keeps Americans off his vacation island. I don't give a shit how typical Americans act, nobody except a snobbish elitist pompous asshole would want to deprive an entire country of medical supplies and everyday necessities just to keep that island 'mostly' free of Americans.
I'd like to encourage you to visit Cuba for yourself, unfiltered. Walk to the streets and talk to the people. Don't take tours; visit the place and see what it's really like. It will be an eye opener, and you might even change your mind on a few things.
I would encourage you to do the same in any number of poor urban areas in capitalist countries, but you'd likely end up dead. Seriously, I have looked at the pictures you linked to an it is remarkably similar to some of the nicer areas of downtown Kingston, Jamaica. You don't see pictures of those places, because, well f you go there people will steal your camera. Even the police are afraid to go to those places.
The problem is quite simply poverty. It's not because the people in these countries are stupid or lazy or because of communism or capitalism. If it makes you feel better to think that the people of cuba are poor because of communism or fidel castro or whatever, then fine. But, I'm gonna tell you right now, the reason why some people are poor and some are rich is simply because you need to have money to make money. The rich nations have all the money and they aren't sharing. It's as simple as that.
Cherry-picking the key points (I'll try not to take them out of context):
:P After all, my free will cannot be taken from me, right?
I respect your right to opine as you do, and I hope you will find it in you to respect mine to disagree.
I will show courtesy to you in the expectation that it'll be reciprocated, yes.
Nothing is inalienable according to [your] way of thinking.
That would be broadly accurate and fits in with, for example, the fact that one of the largest nations on earth, China, doesn't give a damn about human rights. As far as I can tell, the concept of inalienable rights is a very Western, specifically American, viewpoint.
We are all powerless slaves that have to go begging for privileges from the master.
As Mao said, power emanates from the barrel of a gun. In America the citizenry have a lot of guns. As a Brit, and thus a subject of a monarchy with a long and bloody past, I'm aware that pretty much the only thing that stops the government oppressing me is the fact that it would be more trouble than it's worth. I've seen Americans trying to adapt to this attitude; it's not pretty.
Authoritarianism depends on this kind of thinking.
I never said inalienable rights weren't a damn useful illusion to maintain. The fact that it's a good idea to act like they exist doesn't mean that they do.
You can outlaw something like speaking freely, but you cannot take away man's natural ability to do so.
You can cut out his tongue or kill him. This has generally proved to be an extremely effective approach in the absence of sign language and/or necromancy. I'd also note that any argument that applies to the ability to speak freely also applies to the ability to hit your neighbour over the head with a mallet, which I doubt you would class as an inalienable right.
Even within the most repressive of regimes there has typically existed a very active underground where the true nature of man is able to continue despite terrible opposition.
Yeah, Britain has one of those. It's called the IRA and, as far as I can tell, the part of man's true nature that it expresses is his enjoyment of blowing up other men. And women and, for the hat trick, children and puppies. Again, if these rights you speak of are so inalienable, how come they're not easily differentiable, except by pointing, from the mallet example I mentioned earlier?
Ultimately, therefore, it is I who am the victor and not he, for he has failed in getting me to do what he wanted done.
I'd suggest that, if what the master intended was for you to be an example pour encourager les autres, he has in fact succeeded.
On a side note: it's trivial to show that there are no inalienable rights - show me a right and I'll give you an example of when and where it's been alienated. What I think you mean is "rights that shouldn't be alienated". This is an entirely relative concept, depending on who's talking. In the absence of a Creator god, there is no intrinsic moral direction to the universe, so there's no easy way to decide whose "should" is correct. Hence there are no universal inalienable rights.
No matter what steps are taken, my free will cannot be taken from me. Freedom is inherent in my very nature. It is inalienable. It is a right.
If this were the case I'd have killed my pesky little sister long ago
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
If there is no copyright for it in their country.
As a sovereign country that should be easy enough to arrange.
Point 1, copyright:
As far as I can tell, Cuba does have copyright laws, and has been a signatory to the Berne convention for some time, although this was not true at the time of the revolution. In any case, this would require them to honor recent US copyrights, although it is my understanding that they're prety lax about it. However, the US doesn't have any kind of leverage with them, either carrot or stick, since we're going to do the same thing no matter how cooperative or uncooperative they are.
Point 2: Import
It's not illegal for Cuba to obtain US goods, from their own perspective. They don't have a trade ban with the US. So from their perspective, a copy of windows obtained through a gray market means but duly paid for is valid. So it means that such a copy is not pirated.
Point 3: Differing laws and doctrines.
Much of the control that a software publisher has over a work is due, not to copyright per se, but by different laws such as contract laws governing the license. If the laws are very different, as I suspect they are in Cuba, the power of the copyright holder may be very different.
Other doctrines may affect whether an action represents "piracy". For example, in the US, consumers are allowed to copy media, say from a CD to a portable music player, and it is not considered a copyright infringement so long as it is for non-commercial purposes. It is quite plausible that a country, particularly a communist country, might have a doctrine that allows software to be installed on multiple computers, so long as it's duly paid for and the media itself is not duplicated for resale. They might not even consider installing software on a computer to be copying at all.
So long as they don't discriminate between domestic software publishers and foreign ones, they aren't necessarily violating Berne, although the US would certainly vigorous disagree.
Point 4: Conclusion: The inability of Cuba to obtain windows through means that the US would consider legal probably doesn't mean squat to Cuba.
Which means is that Cuba probably chose Linux for other reasons.
Point 5: This is not good for Microsoft.
In wealthy, technologically advanced nations, new computer adoption is very slow, which means that Microsoft's revenue sources are limited to customers they can force on to an update treadmill, customers they can convince to buy their software on a subscription model, and customers they can attract away from competitors. This last bit is getting harder, because there aren't any competitors in their bread and butter product areas who have any market share worth stealing, and in the other product areas a Darwinian proces has produced competition that is the toughest Microsoft has ever faced.
Which is why I'm guessing the developing world is important to Microsoft. They may sell Windows at what amounts to only $10 a pop, but the development costs other than localization are sunk. It may represent the last spigot of easy money Microsoft has access to.
Cuba may be off America's cultural radar screen, but it does have relations with the rest of the world, particularly the developing world. If Cuba successfully replaces Windows with Linux, it will be an example for how a poor country can make its own way without having to pay Microsoft. I'd bet that Microsoft would rather have them pirate Windows, provided they had some plausible pretext to deny this.
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Nothing like enjoying a rum and coke after seeing a 5 year old kid digging through the trash to get their breakfast/lunch/dinner all in one fell swoop. Maybe the kid was enjoying left overs that you had thrown away the day before? Nothing like supporting a corrupt dictatorship that treats you better than its own citizens(can you even call them that?) BTW, just how satisfying was that rum and coke? Must have been pretty tasty...
Inalienable rights cannot be taken away or given away, from a philisophical standpoint.
Nobody denies that rights can (and often are) violated.
Open source is not communism. Open source is people putting together something as a hobby, and then companies joining them because using open source is cheaper than developing your own operating system from scratch.
The hobby value and ego value are what drive open source (at least until corporate sponsorship takes over much of the work, as it has now).
Now, you are right about what people under Communism think of the US. I can say that my Cuban girlfriend, while snuggling with me in our rented love nest, would look at the satellite TV with A Jerrold Perenchio's Univision TV network blaring, and she would see all those cool homes and cars and fashions, and she assumed that if she ever got to LA with me, she would have all of them.
Unfortunately, the TV shows show the lifestyle of A Jerrold Perenchio, owner of Univision. He owns half of Malibu and Bel Air. It's definitely picturesque, but I would agree, it's a bit curious how people in Communist countries just assume you are Perenchio, and not plain old Dennis.
Oh curse you Perenchio! (laugh).
That being said, it's not the whole story, either.
Communism was such a successful system that a wall had to be erected to prevent people from leaving East Germany for West Germany, even though East Germany was the most economically successful of the Communist countries.
When the wall fell apart, so did Communism.
It's absurd to say that such a brittle system was a success. Let me give you one comparison:
In East Germany, you could save for ten years and be on the waiting list and you would eventually get a Trabant car. The Trabant car had a 26hp engine and a top speed of 56mph. It got there in about 33 seconds.
In West Germany, you could save a comparable amount for those same ten years and get something on the order of a Porsche 911. The Porsche 911 has a very powerful engine that at the time of Communism got to 60mph in something like 7 seconds and of course the top speed was way, way over that.
So no, I'm sorry to break this news to you, but Communism didn't succeed. If you don't believe me, another test: Fly a Soviet jet to Cuba and then ride on a Boeing. You'll pick the Boeing, every time.
D
I'd say "it always risks faults". Actually, shortages were a particular failure of the Soviet Union. It would have been possible to raise prices somewhat to balance the supply and demand, which would instantly eliminate shortages, like it happens in market economies by design. But it was a politically difficult decision and it wasn't done when it could have helped. When the government finally "liberated" the prices, it was too late - Soviet Union was destroyed, the planned economy lied in shambles and hyperinflation soared.
So it shouldn't be impossible to avoid shortages and rationing in a planned economy.
As for robots and fusion, it's coming. According to Japanese (NISTEP 2001 forecast), the robots (the big ones) will become mainstream around 2020 (in farming, households and elsewhere). Fusion is likely to take at least a decade more. Nanorobots can be expected in 2030s.
But I expect some elements of non-capitalistic economy to appear much earlier. We already have the open source movement. Soon we will have affordable 3D printers, then tabletop biotech. There are a lot of things that can be created this way. And then the robots arrive.
And these are just the inevitable things, who knows what can be done by sufficiently large groups of volunteers or by socialist governments around the world.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
For a while, Cuba was economically almost an extension of the United States. And the economy in general did very well by it. Certainly a lot better than it's doing now.
But sure, many third world countries are poor, and many are worse off than Cuba.
For most of them, the problem isn't poverty; it's an attitude.
If you hate us, if you steal from us, if you make our visits a living horror, we won't come, and then there's no reason for us to share.
If you invite us warmly, and if you treat us well, we will visit your country and get $500 a night hotel suites overlooking the ocean. We will go out on the town and eat in your most expensive restaurants.
But if you steal our $5,000 cameras, well, we'll never come back again.
I understand that's roughly what happened in Jamaica. Is that the fault of poverty, or is that the fault of a culture that approves of stealing?
I'd say the latter. There are plenty of poor places that are hospitable, and those places are getting richer all the time, and more power to them.
D
You started a long list, so we might just as well work towards making it comprehensive.
Among the democrats and/or moderates which the US replaced or actively helped to replace with dictators, we could add
Patrice Lumumba, assassinated in Zaire
Jacobo Arbenz, overthrown in Guatemala
Among the dictators which the US helped to stay in power for far too long:
The Shah of Iran (this backfired, since when he was eventually overthrown, it was by someone probably even worse: Khomeini)
And basically all of those who ruthlessly ruled Latin America until recently.
In fact, I'm trying to find a case where the US helped overthrow a dictator to let room for a democratic regime. The most recent case I can think of is Hitler. Has there been another since?
Because Cuba actually HAS weapons of mass destruction (soviet) and WILL use them in case of invasion.
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I'll do my best.
Citing examples where rights are supressed is irrelevant to my main points. I earlier stated that I was well aware of regimes where such rights are not respected. The rights themselves continue to exist.
Without providing an answer, I'd just like to invite you to think about why it is currently more trouble than it's worth. What would make it "worth it"? Are things heading in that direction?
If inalienable rights are a lie, then they would not be a good thing -- at least in the sense that they would incourage an ignorant and delusional population. If I can ascribe to one illusion, what else can I accept as truth that is false? Where does it stop?
I actually considered that you might mention mutilation in response to what I had said, but hoped that you would understand the larger concept I was driving at. If you cut out my toungue, you still don't have my willful obedience. I still have a free nature. You have failed to take that away.
Allow me then, to clarify. My freedom to act stops when such action violates the freedoms of others to do likewise.
Actually, they're very easily differentiable. See my paragraph above about stepping on the rights of others. The IRA blowing up puppies would probably fall into such a category.
In a fearful population that is used to thinking of themselves as slaves, you're probably right. Among a population that understands its' true strength and the nature of freedom -- one that is willing to whatever is necessary to defend it -- things might not be so clear-cut. I would suggest that the aforementioned torture and death could create a martyr-figure -- just what might be needed to convince an informed population to respond decisively to such tyrrany, at which point, I have, in fact, succeeded, to the extent that the tyrant is defeated.
We're fighting over semantics. My working definition of inalienable is still incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred, but to that I think I would add "without dire consequences" to the party that's trying to do the alienation. You can try to alienate the rig
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Actually, Cuba is a 2nd world country.
"Us, Them and the third world", that's how the name came to life. Soviet Union is no more, China is still totalitarian but hardly communist, actually only North Korea, Cuba and maybe a small handful of others remained from the Second World, but Cuba is pretty "flagship" at that.
Otherwise, I agree with what you intended to mean.
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Yeah, and the last time he was "elected," what percentage of the "vote" did he get? 100%? 99.99%? Don't confuse a dictator's faux republicanism with the real deal.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Riiight. "[T]hose who say that Cubans are receiving great healthcare thanks to Castro, don't know what they are talking about." Go have a look. I dare you.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Cuba is actually quite notorious for being an expensive tourism destination that doesn't deliver well on its high prices. If you stay at their hotels and take their expensive packaged tours, on the whole there is a pretty low level of satisfaction.
Basically, Castro seems keen to suck every dollar out of you, regardless of how it affects your experience.
My rating of Cuba would have been very different if I had stayed at the tourist hotels or taken tour busses around. I stayed at a casa particular (a room in a private home) and walked around Havana. Had the time of my life, as I said.
But I never saw a smile on the faces of the "privileged" people on the tour busses. I don't think they were having much fun.
D
It could simply be that Castro wants to improve national security by ensuring there are no back doors through which the American 3-letter agencies can spy on the Cuban government....
The original poster apparently enjoys the embargo because it keeps Americans off his vacation island.
Or perhaps he was just trying to get your knickers in a twist.
Edith Keeler Must Die
Communism is an ideal system and would work really well as long as you don't get people involved. They'll ruin it every time.
When they came for the communists, I said "He's next door. Take him away. Goddam commies."
I have agreed with this for a long time and I think a country that decided that intellectual property was an outdated concept would surely profit.
But blaming this solely on the U.S. isn't really correct.
Though your movies say the FBI will show up at your house if you commit a copywright violation the U.N. also has sanctions against them... that's where real changes need to take place.
yeah, that's it.
Go hug some trees.
Don't forget about Indonesia. Most of weapons used in the occupation of East Timor were sold to Indonesian army by US, and their soldiers were trained by US instructors.
If I had a company and wanted, or did, sell my product in Cuba, wouldn't I be in REALLY big trouble for passing the embargo? Is it just me?
Should cubans substract rent rent payments + interests for the U.S. military base in Guantanamo from that amount?
You bet we do.
Can You Say - MANDRIVA?
So Cuba will go from WMD(windows of mass destruction) to the OS of the masses, sweet.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
Thanks for a great discussion. I shall proceed with a list of my mistakes - thanks for drawing my attention to them.
:P
I said: "I will show courtesy to you in the expectation that it'll be reciprocated, yes." Just to confirm, I wasn't being rude, I was just translating what you said to avoid starting my argument against rights with an implicit appeal to them.
My working definition of inalienable is still incapable of being alienated, surrendered, or transferred
My bad - I'd got my definitions confused.
If you cut out my tongue, you still don't have my willful obedience. I still have a free nature. You have failed to take that away.
Yeah, that was a bit of a sophistry. I think the point that I was trying to make is that free will is a very fuzzily-defined concept. The very concept that will can exist independent of body presupposes a divide between them, which isn't always the case (at best it's a simplification). A trivial example: if I hit your knee, triggering the kick reflex, have I removed your free nature? It was your nervous system that triggered the action after all, and that nervous system forms the lowest level of your mind.
I'd also like to point out that sufficient torture is able to warp the mind of even the strongest individual - read 1984 for a description of the effects. Given the fact that, with sufficient effort, it is possible to subjugate the will of another, can we really say that our free natures can't be taken away? That would seem to be at best a rather fine distinction.
Moving on to the key points:
I earlier stated that I was well aware of regimes where such rights are not respected. The rights themselves continue to exist.
How do we know that the rights still exist if they fail to manifest themselves in any way? How do we know that they're not just a happy illusion that enables us to get along with each other? Continuing in the same thread...
If inalienable rights are a lie, then they would not be a good thing -- at least in the sense that they would encourage an ignorant and delusional population.
They would also be good in the sense that they would foster a stable society. Without some perception that other people Have Rights, and just as importantly that other people have the same perception, we'd be a nation of sociopaths and civilisation would die in a sea of paranoia. Personally I prefer a white lie to constant fear. None of this, however, implies that rights are anything more than convenient lies.
On a lighter note, regards the ignorant and delusional population: have you taken a good look at the world lately?
If I can ascribe to one illusion, what else can I accept as truth that is false? Where does it stop?
My thoughts are as follows (quite lengthy - skip it if it gets boring):
We may accept the input of our senses as being an accurate reflection of the forces acting on our bodies unless we have specific reason to think otherwise (hallucinogenic drugs for example). It may not be true (we could be in the Matrix), but if we don't make this assumption then there's no point continuing anyway, so we might as well give the world as we perceive it the benefit of the doubt.
We can, on average, give information relayed to us by the scientific community the benefit of the doubt. This is because it is independently verifiable, even by ourselves if we wish to go to that much trouble. It's noticeable on slashdot that people are instantly taken more seriously if they provide links to references for their argument. Even if no-one follows the argument, the fact that it's possible to check whether the reference is valid or whether it's just another goatse link renders the reference trustable.
We can't rely on things we're told that aren't independently verifiable. As an example of the distinction: Religious Studies classes are trustable since we can actually go check what
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
So it shouldn't be impossible to avoid shortages and rationing in a planned economy.
For a society, yes. For an individual, no - with limited resources any individual can't get everything he wants, so you're bound to have discontent. (Whether the group thinks this individual is enough sigmas out of the norm isn't relevant - it's hard to tell the genius from the whacko at first.) With limitless energy and "man"-power, the balance changes a bit.
I think part of the reason fusion is always 30 years off is because it has great potential to change the balance of power on the geopolitical stage, at a societal level.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
If a barrier is undetectable and people can pass through it at will, can it really be said to exist?
If inalienable (and, by implication, universal) rights can't be consistently defined (compare the moral codes of any 2 doctrines of your choice) and a lot of people don't respect them anyway, can they really be said to be universal?
If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound or does it just vibrate the air?
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
the government has the "right" to take your property
except for land held in Allodial title. ie. "Allodial title is inalienable, in that it cannot be taken by any operation of law for any reason whatsoever."
though from the same entry... "as the Fifth Amendment to the Bill of Rights clearly gives goverments the right to take property for public use if appropriate compensation is given."
most private property in the US is not held in true allodial title, though I've been told that Texas has allodial land available. Most land in the US was allodial title (eg. after the revolutionary war). The government has assumed ownership of the land via unknowing contract:
"Allodial title cannot not be taken away against the will of the owner (title holder) as the owner is sovereign over the allodial property. However, an allodial owner can contractually give up allodial ownership.." "many freeholders exercised that right by exchanging with municipalities the right to taxation for benefits from sharing resources with their neighbors. This practice was adopted in large scale during the Great Depression.."
-metric
After reading some of the comments, I couldn't help creating an account and posting this. Images can say a lot more than words. Visit www.therealcuba.com I'm cuban and it really hurts too see someone defending such cruel system (most of them not even know the truth about the country and everything its people - including my familiy and friends- go through each day)
But if you go a few blocks away, you see scenes like I did [amazing.com]. All these pictures were taken on what would be prime real estate in any other country, a block or less from the Malecon, the giant seawall that faces the ocean and is a major gathering spot for Cubans.
Obviously you don't get out of the suburbs much. There are worse slums than that in Philly or NYC.
Why is it that communist Cuba is boycotted by United States, yet United States deals with communist China? Seems a bit hypocritical to me.
And anyway, such patches could easily be filtered through, for example, a European kernel developer. Besides which, how hard would it be for a Cuban to get a non-Cuban email address from which to originate patches??
The key difference between traditionalist social systems, such as the USSR and capitalist ones is that the former intend to eliminate suffering, while the latter aim to maximize the consumption. Yes, you couldn't get a Porsche 911 in Soviet Union (or East Germany), but let me tell you - I rode on one, I worked with people who sell them and nowhere it says that these things make you happier. Sure, some fools may believe that their life somehow becomes better because they drive a 911, but from the point of view of a Porsche dealer these are just expensive toys sold to rich suckers with too large ego.
:(
Soviet Union didn't look kindly on its citizens trying to partake in such consumerist lifestyle. However, it did some nice things instead. For example, unemployment was eliminated in Soviet Union around 1930 once and for all. And it wasn't just any job - every citizen could expect to have a job adequate for his education and skills. There was free quality education and health care. While some may dwell on the fact that apartments weren't as lavish as those in Beverly Hills and note that about 1% of the people still lived in communal flats in 1980s, a more honest observer would note that Soviet people were essentially given quality apartments with all modern facilities and paid for those only about 4% of their income. Food consumption was very high, there was no hunger. In 1980s consumption of most food products per capita in the USSR was higher than in the US (with the exception of meat). Food was cheap, natural and healthy. Each city had good public transporation and in the biggest cities subway systems were constructed.
Yeah, sure may be Boeing is better. But then again, may be having cheap air and train tickets was worth something too. Even the poorest Sovet people could afford flying across Soviet Union to visit their friends or just travel around.
Communism (socialism) was indeed a resounding success in Soviet Union. People lived happy lives free from need and suffering. Of course, people are never content with what they had and so they started wondering if they could each get a Porsche. Sadly, noone told them that while there are systems to provide anyone with a moderate income and systems to provide a few with a luxurious lifestyle, there are no socio-economic systems to provide everyone with a luxurious lifestyle. So they took a system that worked and replaced it with the one that didn't.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
They can get cars made after the Edsel; the government uses Mercedes. They're probably just prohibitively expensive for most of the population.
Of course, they can't get American cars because of the embargo. Good thing it doesn't apply to computers, since they're all made in China...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The only right evolution grants to you, and every other living being, is the right to try to survive as best you see fit.
Everything else is an illusion
Well, this was NOT the source of the hyperinflation. Virtual money ("beznal") that were allowed to be real money were. In Soviet economy these money were more like resource allocation quotas than the realy money and suddenly huge amount of these virtual money flowed into the economy. Imagine what whould happen if U.S. authorities will suddenly run printing press creating hundreds times more $$ than today exist in the world and dump these into the U.S. economy. Chaos.
Isn't it illegal for MS to Sell Windows to Cuba? I know that any other country can deal with Cuba, no problems.....but aren't American companies still prohibited?
Only boring people are ever bored.
For most of them, the problem isn't poverty; it's an attitude. If you hate us, if you steal from us, if you make our visits a living horror, we won't come, and then there's no reason for us to share. If you invite us warmly, and if you treat us well, we will visit your country and get $500 a night hotel suites overlooking the ocean. We will go out on the town and eat in your most expensive restaurants.
Oh you wonderful generous American tourists! God bless you! I think the grandparent was referring to "sharing" on a larger scale, i.e. at the scale of trade agreements and embargos.
I'd say the latter. There are plenty of poor places that are hospitable, and those places are getting richer all the time, and more power to them.
But Cuba is famous for being hospitable. So by your argument it shouldn't be poor. But you've just been saying it's poor. Sort your head out. And I think the idea that the prosperity of a country can be related to its hospitality is ludicrous. How hospitable is China? Is France more hospitable than Cuba?
Freedom is not increased by mere diminuation of government. Anarchy is freedom for the strong and slavery for the weak.
Most large companies like Coca Cola have many associate companies around the world that are licensed to use its trademarks, patents, and to manufacture and bottle its products. So its not just one company. I have heard that in fact the top-level Coke corporation is technically based in Japan, no idea if that's true or not.
For the reading comprehension challenged (you), the cite your provided claims the origin of the phrase "useful idiots" is circa the early 80's.
And your point is what? That if it's not in google, it doesn't exist? Don't be a moron all your life.
I haven't declined to argue anything. I merely sought to address the points of your post. However, you predictably launched into a grammer-nazi nit-parade. If you want to have an adult discussion - which I don't believe you are capable of - then lets proceed. Otherwise, stop wasting time, bandwidth, and SQL rows.
All he was doing was responding to the assertion that democratic countries automatically have the high ground morally. And doing a good job of showing said assertion to be patently untrue.
Nice job putting words in his mouth though.
A blog about stuff.
You're right, of course. I didn't mean that "price liberalisation" caused hyperinflation, only that hyperinflation was one of the reasons why price liberalisation could not really help.
There were two separate sectors of economy - the production was managed according to the plan and money served only a technical function (resource allocation quotas and a way for mutual account settlement) and the consumption was a market with set prices.
Of course, as you describe, chaos ensued when these two sectors were combined.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Trying to cross the Mexico-US frontier
. stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4152307
http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=645992
This information is so much at variance with what I know of the Soviet Union, and what I saw in Cuba, that I just don't know what to say.
I hope you are aware of the horrible prices paid by the victims of Comrade Stalin for such progress that occured in the Soviet Union. People were shot because they didn't want to conform to the norms of the new Soviet man. People were shot becuase they were "kulaks", having an extra cow compared to their neighbor. People were shot because Comrade Stalin was in the mood to shoot someone.
Everything I have read about the Soviet Union indicates that life was unhappy and darkly cynical, because the system didn't work well at all. Everything was shoddy, from the housing and the cars to the planes. And people on the top of society always feared the midnight knock on the door, the trip to the mysterious places, the torture chambers and the KGB's bullet.
If my memory serves, only Party functionaries and their friends were allowed to travel at all, let alone by plane. Sure, the official fares were cheap, but that was because demand was limited; nobody was allowed to fly them.
The safety record of Soviet planes, alas, speaks for itself.
And finally, I drive an old Mercedes and really love it. I bought it five years ago for about the price of a new Ford Focus and driving it gives me much joy. Consumerism as it's practiced today has laughable aspects, but it also lets me buy great things, that I use in my business and my life, and that I get genuine joy out of.
I'm really sorry. A Trabant just won't do for me. And I'm really not anxious to get that knock on the door any time soon.
D
This was exactly my point.
Cuba's system makes it inhospitable to both tourists and residents. With a better system, it would be more prosperous.
D
I had a relationship with a nice girl in another country.
It was probably based more on my paying for stuff than her actual undying feelings for me, but that's often true here as well. And I do think she genuinely did enjoy the time we spent together, and we were both sorry to see it end when I left.
I'm sorry, but I just don't see anything morally wrong with that. We both benefitted and we both left with smiles and good memories.
D
Karl Doenitz was the man almost totally responsible for the development of Germany's U-boat strategy during WWII. He was a naval officer, but never joined the NSDAP. Eventually he became commander-in-chief of the German navy, and after Hitler committed suicide, he succeeded him and was the man who negotiated Germany's surrender.
His story is very interesting. It covers WWII from a first-hand German but not Nazi perspective, and there are parts of the book where he seriously tries to grapple with larger issues such as if he had been aware of what was going on in Germany if he would have helped in the plot to assassinate Hitler (he concludes that as much as he would like to believe he would help in taking Hitler down, that he simply has no way of knowing how he would have reacted in this circumstance).
I think that some of the most interesting reading about WWII Germany has to include this book, Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich (written as a psychologist's first-hand look at the rise to power of the NSDAP), and a few others.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Thank you, too! Even thought we may not agree on every point, it's good to have an intelligent discussion on the subject.
Here, as well as in previous posts, you have stated that although you consider rights a "white lie", the protection of them is beneficial. To me, this (the positive results) is a certain kind of evidence of their correctness. "Existance" is a very ambiguous word. If what you mean is that someone isn't going to stumble across a block of material that turns out to be a "right", therefore proving their existance, I think we agree. Rights are an idea, but I don't think that makes them any less real or correct. BTW, I guess if you really want to insist on a physical manefestation, you could look at ideas as sparks between neurons, but this begs the question: "How can I know which sparks between the nuerons of whom are correct? Which are delusional? Can we perform a repeatable experiment to show such a thing?" I think such an experiment, as relating to a proof for rights, would be very impractical to perform in a traditional controlled, scientific way. Experiments have been performed, however. Throughout history and even now they are ongoing. Western law and government can in many ways be regarded as an experiment to determine if these concepts are correct. The benefits that we see in societies that even flirt with these concepts -- although they have never been implemented fully anywhere -- are already marked. Personally, I would like to see further experimentation here, and on a broader level. :-)
I understand what you're getting at here. Sadly, I don't think there currently exists a population on the planet that fits the description that I've provided of intelligent freedom-loving individuals, united in the mutual defense of rights (at least not to the extent there should be). The masses (all around the globe, I'm not picking on anyone in particular here) have been molded into remote-control weilding zombies that are largely ignorant of, and ambivalent toward their true power and potential, and will therefore never realize such things. I don't think this is entirely by accident. As I mentioned before, an educated, active free society is a tyrant's nightmare. That's why those that have achieved positions of power [corporations, dictators, take your pick of authority figure here] have good reason to actively promote a lifestyle of ignorance and indolence.
Just because you can't measure the rights, doesn't mean you can't measure their result. If something unmeasureable produces a measureable result, does the unmeasurable thing exist? In the end does it matter? If the result is predictable and reproduceable, the principle is a correct one.
This is part of the problem with proving rights. The evidence for them largely rests in the study of history, as it was observed through the lens of whoever (almost never a scientist) did the writing.
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You're equivocating on "hospitable". You were using it before in a much more literal, interpersonal sense, not to refer to the living conditions created by the politicial system. So you're now making a different argument, though it still doesn't make much sense. Not sure what you're getting at in your second sentence. Obviously anywhere would be more prosperous under a better system. Clearly the best way to boost the tourist industry wouldn't be a change in Cuba's economic system, but a lift of the US embargo. There's not much evidence that switching to US puppet capitalism would make Cuba more prosperous. It has a better standard of living than many US-aligned capitalist countries in the region.
Freedom is not increased by mere diminuation of government. Anarchy is freedom for the strong and slavery for the weak.
Here, as well as in previous posts, you have stated that although you consider rights a "white lie", the protection of them is beneficial. To me, this (the positive results) is a certain kind of evidence of their correctness.
:P). If something is a construct of society, it can be expected to vary from society to society. By contrast, if I understand correctly, your view is that rights are built into human nature (can you confirm whether or not I'm correct?).
If I tell my kids that misbehaving will result in the bogeyman getting them, that is a useful (for me) lie - it'll keep them quiet, dammit. However, this does not in any way mean that the bogeyman is real.
Rights are an idea, but I don't think that makes them any less real or correct.
I'd agree that concepts can well be correct or even real (for a sufficiently fuzzy value of real). However, I'd disagree that the particular concept we're looking at, which I consider to be very much a construct of society, is universal, which I believe was what this discussion started with (I confess I'm losing track slightly
Western law and government can in many ways be regarded as an experiment to determine if these concepts are correct. The benefits that we see in societies that even flirt with these concepts -- although they have never been implemented fully anywhere -- are already marked.
I'd point out that not all the effects are good. For example, the consequence of the widely-accepted (in America) right to own weapons has resulted in America having one of the highest homicide rates in the world. American citizens' belief that they Have Rights is, in my opinion, a major contributor to the culture of litigation that has arisen. If we're using real-world effectiveness as one possible proof of the correctness of America's conception of universal rights, surely this would damage those rights' claim to universality?
Sadly, I don't think there currently exists a population on the planet that fits the description that I've provided of intelligent freedom-loving individuals, united in the mutual defense of rights (at least not to the extent there should be)
That's not necessarily something to be sad about. A population of intelligent freedom-loving individuals would be effectively ungovernable. Remember, no matter what the average IQ, someone still has to empty the dustbins. A strong-willed intelligent individual is likely to be less happy about that than a remote-control-wielding zombie (lovely phrase btw). And every society needs indians as well as chiefs.
I think one semantic difference we're about to hit is that I don't accept the concept of a universal good. In a moral-relativist universe, it's impossible to point to any one action and label it as good or evil. Save a child from a burning building? Maybe he grows up to be the next Hitler. Destroy a rainforest? Maybe (for a change) farming actually takes hold, bringing a better standard of living to thousands of locals. Things aren't good in themselves; they're beneficial for a person or group or effective for a purpose.
This is relevant because, although being a remote-wielding zombie sucks, being in a society with a decent leavening of them is much more comfortable than being in a society where everyone wants their hand on the steering wheel. In a similar way, belief that everyone has rights is a very good thing for other people to have, but can limit your potential if you accept it.
What actually are the inalienable rights that everyone keeps talking about?
Sorry, I didn't make myself clear enough. That wasn't a rhetorical question - I really am keen to see a complete list of all the rights that people supposedly posess, for two reasons. Firstly, it'll reduce the risk that we end up talking at cross-purposes by giving me a concrete example. Secondly, for any given list, the question arises of why many people don't agree with that list. If universal, inalie
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
I did part tour, part private (my family is Cuban, so we still have connections to people there, and the packaged tours don't exactly cater to people wishing to visit gravesites and old homes, etc.). The tour wasn't bad, though I thought Veradero was incredibly overrated.
The Havana Libre was a perfectly fine hotel, though, can't complain about that. The resort in Trinidad was gorgeous, although the food there wasn't great. A fair amount of the "tour" was decent. And the private restaurants we ate at, the families we stayed with in Cienfuegos, the visit to the Patronado and meeting the congregation there, all of the more individual events, those were nice too.
Like when you apply them to anything else, mass generalizations about Cuba are usually flawed. Please don't speak about experiences you didn't have, it makes you come off a twit.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
I hope you are aware of the horrible prices paid by the victims of Comrade Stalin for such progress that occured in the Soviet Union. People were shot because they didn't want to conform to the norms of the new Soviet man. People were shot becuase they were "kulaks", having an extra cow compared to their neighbor. People were shot because Comrade Stalin was in the mood to shoot someone.
;)
I was exposed to all this anti-soviet propaganda as well, so I know how you feel. But the facts do not agree with this story.
1) Kulaks weren't simply those with an extra cow. As about 1-2% of the total number of peasant homesteads were kulaks, you can easily see that their relative wealthiness was in most cases real.
2) Kulaks were not shot (there were some such cases, of course), they were sent to other settlements.
3) Local extremeties were responsible for the complications, not orders from Moscow.
4) Nobody shoot anyone just because Stalin was in a bad mood. It sounds impressive, but really this is just nonsense.
Everything I have read about the Soviet Union indicates that life was unhappy and darkly cynical, because the system didn't work well at all.
Well, then don't believe everything you read.
Everything was shoddy, from the housing and the cars to the planes.
I am sitting in an apartment in a Soviet-built house right now (built in 1987 - design called "137-series"). It's not shoddy at all (not lavish, though). Some cars (especially the most popular Lada) were shoddy, but so were American cars at some point. And the planes are fine (last time I flew on a Soviet-built motor-plane in 2003) if you do not compare them with Boeings built in 2005. What you read was simply not true - Soviet products were generally good (not excessively good), with some exceptions.
And people on the top of society always feared the midnight knock on the door, the trip to the mysterious places, the torture chambers and the KGB's bullet.
First - not always, only in 1937-1939, when the Soviet society had only a few years left before the inevitable war with the most powerful evil force on Earth. The society could not afford any dissent, because if every single Soviet citizen didn't stand behind the mobilization effort, Hitler would destroy Soviet Union and then everyone else. Second, this was a part of the power struggle in the Party, not some evilness of communism. Stalin was not all-powerful in 1930s and there were indeed some, who wanted to overthrough him. The stories of conspiracies may sound outlandish today, but you should remember that even in the US in 1934 there was a plot to overthrough Roosevelt and install a fascist dictatorship (google "general Butler"), so there is nothing unbelievable about a Trotskist pact in the USSR.
If my memory serves, only Party functionaries and their friends were allowed to travel at all, let alone by plane. Sure, the official fares were cheap, but that was because demand was limited; nobody was allowed to fly them.
You memory most certainly doesn't. Everyone was allowed to travel and everyone did. Notably, the amount of air travel in RSFSR in 1989 was thrice the air travel in Russia in 2005 (passenger*km).
The safety record of Soviet planes, alas, speaks for itself.
What do you mean? During the Soviet time (not in 1990s, when Aeroflot was divided into 400+ companies) the safety record was excellent. The safety margin was usually 1.5 greater than in the West. Soviet planes may have not been most comfortable, most quiet and most efficient, but they were cerainly some of the safest. Any modern Russian air company that has both Boeings and Soviet planes would confirm it.
And finally, I drive an old Mercedes and really love it. I bought it five years ago for about the price of a new Ford Focus and driving it gives me much joy. I'm really sorry. A Trabant just won't do for me.
Look, a Trabant is not an embodiment of all that was bad in socialism. Watch
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
Sorry I took so long to respond. I had a busy weekend ;-)
There is a difference. When you lie to your child in this way, you are correct that you will likely receive an immediate positive (keeping them in line), but when they grow up and realize you lied to them, they will be more inclined to openly rebel against all your teachings. Many religionists often find themselves trapped by this, eventually. Don't masturbate -- you'll go blind. The kid grows up, discovers he didn't go blind, then decides maybe his friends that keep telling him that heroin and crack will "expand his mind" have been right all along, too. The point is, even though this appears on the surface to produce a positive, over time, the net result will likely be negative. Constrast this with the protection of rights, which I consider to be a net positive.
I don't know if I'd use those words, exactly. To better convey my feelings, I'll treat the "Scientific Method", in much the same way we've been discussing rights:
Just what is this scientific method I keep hearing about? Why can't I find evidence of its' "existance"? I haven't been able to find any instrument capable of detecting its' presence. Obviously the scientific method is nothing more than a "white lie" we tell our kids to get them to invent and discover cool stuff -- useful, but non-existant.
I consider the scientific method and human rights to be in about the same category. From what I gather, the difference in our POV appears to be that you consider these principles to be inventions of humans for our benefit. I consider them discoveries of pre-existing principles that don't change, regardless of our perception (correct or incorrect) of them. In other words, to answer the famous tree question: Yes. I do think the tree makes a sound (or vibrates the air, or some synonym or equivalent to making a sound) when it falls, even when no one is around to hear it. Although this may fall into the category of "something I think, but can't prove", to me it would violate Occam's Razor to think otherwise (If it makes a sound when I'm always around, it seems a pretty big assumption that it wouldn't when I'm not).
The perception of the U.S. as an overtly violent place is really exaggerated, thanks in no small part, to Hollywood's stellar portrayal of things. Most of the really high crime rates are often confined to a few square blocks in most major metropolitan areas. Anyone who's been around the U.S. a bit can tell you that the rural zones actually have higher ownership of firearms. In some places it's hard to find a pickup truck that doesn't have a shotgun or two hanging in the rear window. Shockingly, these are frequently places with far less crime. From what I can tell, in other countries where firearms have been outlawed, or restricted heavily to varying degrees, the results are inconclusive at best. Here's a good discussion of the subject. Scroll down for the top 10 worst countries for homicide in 2003. I don't know about the others, but I lived in Mexico for over 2 years, and I happen to know that all private ownership of firearms is forbidden there. Despite this it continues to be a very violent place. Even though firearm deaths aren't as common (they still happen, though), stabbings are an every-day occurance. Most of the numbers
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Sorry, I just realized that the link to statistics on UK crime in my first post takes you to a 404. Here's the correct link.
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So why don't you explain what the fuss is all about?
And that's all the reply you deserve, troll-boy.
That's inconceivable!
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
The whole "violently free" thing is amusingly ironic... I'm nuts? You're clueless. I'll take nuts.
"Socialism": A political/economic policy advocating that the means of production and market should be controlled by the whole.
"Communism": A class system in which all property is public and individuals are paid according only to their contribution.
There is a pretty clear difference if you consider the two, rather then just fear-monger. You can have socialist concepts within a capitalist framework (or vice versa) just as you can have socialist concepts within a communist framework (or vice versa). Indeed, Marx wrote that a purely socialist system was a stepping stone if society wanted to transition to pure communism. If you had every actually read this, as you so advocate, rather then just babble foolishness that you read in the National Post, you'd know this.
As for "a basic review of history". Perhaps in your neo-con world, this works - unfortunately, last I checked, Canada isn't communist, but we're fairly sociailist. However, if you'd like to present some facts to back up your wildly off-base claim, do so. I'm all ears.
I never said Cuba didn't suck. Indeed, I've never been to Cuba. How you connected to that one is beyond me. Indeed, I never used the word "Cuba" at all. Nice try, though...
As for the liberal media... for every example you give that the media is "liberal", I can give an example that they are "conservative". This is why I called it a half-truth. I recognize a blurred line when I see one. Can you say the same? It seems not.
"This Hour has 22 minutes" is supposed to be ironic and comedic. Clearly, you don't get it. If you think Rick Mercer's "talking to Americans" is a state sanctioned inditement of policy and action, than you put way to much stock in Rick Mercer. Indeed, I'm sure that'd make him happy... but he'd probably also agree that you've wildly missed the point.
At any rate... I don't often listen much to people who write the words "fer chrissakes" and "BWAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!". If you can't even take the time to articulate your ideas (what little original ideas you seem to have, that is) in a clear format, then how much stock should others really put in those ideas in the first place?
Oh, and the whole "Canadian culture is just..." stupidity: If you've gotten to terrified of the truth and narrow minded as to characterize an entire country of people by the odd television commercial you see, then you're truly ignorant and should probably go back to school or something.
By your logic, American culture is all about:
1. Join the military and bomb stuff.
2. Abortion is killing babies.
3. Chemical companies are good, preservation is bad.
4. Join the military and bomb stuff.
5. Fear everything, because everyone is jelous of your freedoms.
6. Healthy food is anqituated - everything should be a buffet and KFC/Taco Bell buffets are totally acceptable food.
7. Join the military and bomb stuff.
8. Don't mind your weight... you can always get surgery to fix that.
This is clearly not the case... but if you watch television in the United States for a week, that's about the lions share of the advertisements you'll see.
bash-3.00$ uname -a
SunOS panda 5.10 Generic sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-2
please visit us in cuba (if you have the freedom to do it)and then give a real opnion of cubans life style and our emigration system.
a question: a person who wants to migrate and take a ship or a plane with guns and knifes is a heroe or is a terrorist?
Afghanistan and Iraq, just recently.
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
Actually, Ohio got the attention because it was closer, not because there were more irregularities--no credible evidence has surfaced of significant irregularities in Ohio.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1