Slashdot Mirror
Thailand Bans YouTube
An anonymous reader writes "The new government of Thailand that forced its way into power last year has banned the website YouTube after a 44 second clip was found of someone spray painting on a picture of Thailand's king. When Google refused to remove the 'offending' clip the website was redirected to a different page. This comes days after a Swiss man was jailed 10 years for spray painting on pictures of the king while drunk, and is the same government that earlier this year slammed open source software for being useless and buggy."
Banning the Internet pretty much equates to banning education. Maybe it's time to return to the stone age. I hear there were less climate change issues back then.
Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the author.
I was going to say about the same - if I called MS software useless and buggy here, I'd get 95% kudos and a few dirty insults. Some OSS is very buggy, other software is not. The biggest issue from a commercial standpoint is there is no accountability with it, so if it is buggy, there is no guarantee it will be fixed. This is why some OSS vendors like MySQL use two licenses - one OSS, one commercial with support and vendors like RedHat sell free software (because they give paid support). Truth be told, I have few problems with modern OS's, be it Linux, MacOS X, or Windows. The last BSoD I saw in Windows was due to a memory part going bad, and that was 3 years ago. My last crash running a Windows application was due to a buggy nVidia driver, which incidentally was already patched and I just needed to update my driver (and that was a week or so after Oblivion's release when I bought a new graphics card).
As for the main point, if you were king of a country and saw footage that was a graven insult to you, what would you do? If it I were an absolute tyrant, I'd probably do something horrible like have the perpetrator genitally tortured for pissing on my image, have his feet cut off and then dump him down a well used shithole face first (fortunately, I have no desire to be a tyrant, or to torture people). If that person lived in some other country with much more power than my own, I'd do whatever I could to not let my people see such a thing - like banning the website.
I'm sorry, but I have ZERO respect for any culture that will commit mob violence and/or murder over trivial insults. Fuck them, fuck you and fuck the king.
Wait until the next story on what operating systems the various presidential candidate websites use, then you'll see how tightly bolted to the skull those Slashdot blinders are.
"OMG! Hitler's running Feisty Fawn! Go vote now! Oooh! The website licensed under GPLv3! Quick, go vote for his Final Solution before I cream my pants again!"
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!