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Cuba Lifts Ban on Home Computers
ianare writes "The first legalized home computers have gone on sale in Cuba, the latest in a series of restrictions on daily life which President Raul Castro has lifted in recent weeks. The desktop computers cost almost $800, in a country where the average wage is under $20 a month, but some Cubans do have access to extra income. Internet access remains restricted to certain workplaces, schools and universities on the island which the government claims is due to low bandwidth availability. Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez is laying a new cable under the Caribbean, but it remains unclear whether once the connection is completed, the authorities will allow unrestricted access to the internet."
What's new, though, is that [startin soon], they are going to be sold without operating systems... No more windows pre-installed. Or so I've heard. Now we only need tons of Ubuntu disks to give away at the sotre.
According to Cuban supporters, there is no restriction to visit websites, the real problem is that the whole country have a very limited bandwidth so most pages doesn't load at all. And this limitation is thanks to the US who put a ban on export of goods and services to Cuba.
The main problem I see is that they are using mostly unlicensed copy of windows, since Windows licenses can't be acquired in Cuba.
DNA in your Linux: DNALinux
I hope you aren't basing this off of that Michael Moore movie. Cuba actually has two tiers of medical service, because they engage in a recent market called "medical tourism". Their facilities and services for foreigners is among the best in the world, however their service for civilians has no better system than Canada but far worse service due to only having a fraction of the resources other places have.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
Cuba is not militarily strategically critical, it is ideologically strategically critical. I thought I had made that clear, but perhaps I should have said it three times so it would sink in.
You want a change? Vote.Uh, perhaps you didn't notice, but Bush actually never got enough votes to be president. There were more than enough uncounted votes in each case which, if tradition would be borne out, would have decided both elections (well, there would never have been a second one) for Gore. Voting is about as effective as jerking off - it can be fun, and it can make you feel good, but it's no kind of solution to your problems.
Actually, we wanted to stop giving support to a double-crossing, backstabbing dictator. I wish we would do that with some of our other "friends" around the globe.First, we'd have to start with our own administration(s).
RiiigghtPlease explain what the big new empty prison in Alaska is for.
Prescott Bush was a major contributor to the SS, today we are preparing for the new Third Reich to spring forth from America. The concentration camps are already being constructed all over the nation.
Just cover your eyes, ears, and mouth all at once!
Cubans can actually get health care... RiiigghtI didn't suggest that everything was rosy in Cuba, although I am suggesting that things would be better there than they are here if we weren't crapping them up.
American culture is entirely dependent on people who either do not know or do not care at all about what they are doing to the rest of the world. Our culture is entirely dysfunctional and is falling apart at all the seams. Mental illness is on the rise and it's not just because head shrinkers are nutballs who think everyone is as crazy as they are; things are getting crazier all the time.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I would say, both parts are true. Cuban bandwdith is severely limited, thus, it is obviuous that certain key areas are prioritized (oddly enough, universities aren't - we have a 1mbs for 10 thousand users at mine).
On the other hand, that doesn't explain why don't we have conectivity even within our countries (it is faster to download Debian from the internet that it is to download it from the cuban mirrors). There is even one law to address this issue, that has been largely ignored except on the part of giving monopoly-like powers to our phone company. And it even seem they find cheaper to use satellite to connect two places within the city, than to lay a couple hundred metters of fiber to the nearest hub.
With that, though, I'm willing to call (the ministry of informatics and communications, the phone company, whatever), ignorant rather than evil. I do accept that the reason for that is technical (that we are forbidden to hook to the fiber optics that go around my country). But, there is censorship. Over time, I've collected a set of domains that seem to be banned. No one never confirms it, and the banning works as if the remote server was not working, but routing the request through a proxy server, you find out that it is indeed working. And more recently, we got this other law, that was publicly mentioned by this guy, and forbids chats, formus and mailing lists.
So, we have everything. We have serious technical difficulties caused by the US (internet access). We have serious technical difficulties caused by who-knows-who (intranet access). And, we have censorship. I have high hopes that if the first one is solved, the rest will follow. However, for the sake of my country and our socialism... I do wish that the last two are solved first.