It was all a misunderstanding. The student was clearly using the new Speech to Text feature on Windows Vista. Below is the quote that disturbed the teacher:
Dear aunt, let's set so double the killer delete select all
WTF Man, I "don't see the forest from the trees"?! "... and such it includes Patents."?! RTF amendments!! The exact first thing these amendments are changing in the text of the legislation is:
Amendment 1: (...), as defined by this Directive, other than patents.
The explicitly excluded patents from this directive, on its whole body. Now, what were you talking about again?
Btw, I agree that software (and ideas, in general) should not and must not be patentable. But STFU and read the legislation first, comment later. I doesn't take a lawyer to understand it, only anyone with minimal english reading capabilities.
As soon as you say "Open a terminal and type sudo apt-get (package)", you've lost.
People usually suggests apt-get because it is faster to describe, but there is nothing you can do with apt-get that you cannot do with Synaptics using only GUI and point and click. Only that its description would be "Click on System->Administration->Synaptics Package Manager. Type your password. Click OK. Click on search and type <name of package>. Press OK. Click on the little square next to <name of package> and mark it. Click Apply. Click OK." That's way harder than "click on Applications->Accessories->Terminal. type 'sudo apt-get install <name of package>' without the quotes. Press Enter. type your password. press Y. Press Enter"
Anyway, the kind of people that would need this amount of details is the same people (and I telling that by personal experience, I performed help desk duties on my former programming job) that would need instructions like this, to install a typical setup.exe: "Open the Windows Explorer. No, not the Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer. Click on Start, Programs, Windows Explorer. Can't find it? Press the key with Windows Logo and "E" simulaneously. GO to C:\Program Files\<My Company Name>. How? Click on the little cross next to the folder called C:. Then click Program Files. Tell it to show the content of this folder anyway. Click on <My Company Name>. Double click setup.exe. Click on Next, select I Agree and click Next, Next, Next, Finish"
It took quite a time for the average people to get used to the Next->I Agree->Next->Next->Next->Finish kind of installation, and now it is muscular memory, a simply reflex on most Windows users memory. They don't even read the fine print anymore, and that explains how a lot of people got/get spyware installed along with Kazaa and alike (die Bonzy Buddy, die!). Given enough time, new migrated ubuntu users will get used to synaptics, and "Add and Remove Programs" (that is even easier than Synaptics) and, if the right wind blows, even eventually opening the terminal and making things much easier for them (and for us poor technical people too).
First, a much better submission for this same news can be accessed on the Firehose. It is a mystery to me why that submission was not accepted instead of the one we are commenting on. I think it is because it is not sensationalist, biased against the E.U. and polarizing, limiting itself to present the fact with the minimum possible bias. I will post it here, so we can comment on it instead.
European Parliament rules sharing isn't illegal
"Yesterday, 25/04/2007, the European Parliament voted in favour of a proposal to modify the EU Parliament and Congress directive regarding penal measures destined to enforce Intellectual Property rights. the directive finally establishes in Article 3 that the member states will be responsible of considering as a criminal infraction all intentional IP offences committed at a commercial scale, as well as complicity and/or incitement to these offences. According to Amendment 13, Article 2 of the directive excludes culpability of the acts performed by private users for personal non-profit usage. Read the "
There are some important parts there, that helps to clarify and protect private copying, while harmonizing the legislation among the members states to fight the real threat that this legislation aims: counterfeiting of real world trademarked and copyrighted goods. Here are some important parts of this amendments:
Amendment 1: "Certain criminal provisions need to be harmonised so that counterfeiting and piracy in the internal market can be combated effectively."
Ammendment 3: "The involvement of the holders of intellectual property rights concerned should constitute a supporting role that will not interfere with the neutrality of the state investigations.
Amendment 13: ""infringements on a commercial scale" means any infringement of an intellectual property right committed to obtain a commercial advantage; this would exclude acts carried out by private users for personal and not for profit purposes;
Amendment 16: "Member States shall ensure that the fair use of a protected work, including such use by reproduction in copies or audio or by any other means, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship or research, does not constitute a criminal offence."
Amendment 24: "Member States shall ensure that, through criminal, civil and procedural measures, the misuse of threats of criminal sanctions is prohibited and made subject to penalties. Member States shall prohibit procedural misuse, especially where criminal measures are employed for the enforcement of the requirements of civil law.
Amendment 25: "Member States shall ensure that the rights of defendants are duly protected and guaranteed.
Amendment 27: "The Member States shall put in place adequate safeguards to ensure that such assistance [by the IP holders] does not compromise the rights of the accused person, for example by affecting the accuracy, integrity or impartiality of evidence.
Now, again, let's comment on that. How is that bad for fair use, private copying, etc? It is exactly THE OPPOSITE of what is being stated in the summary of this article, it defines explicitly fair use, right to private copying and creates a legal framework for the IP holders to be able to assert their rights, while protecting the citizens against baseless suits.
And, as a side effect of that, it legalizes the legal parallel importing of goods, making the ones like Lik Sung (sic) to be able to operate on E.U. territory. See below:
Amendment 15: Criminal sanctions shall not be applied in cases of parallel importation of original goods which have been marketed with the agreement of the right-holder in a
(b) "infringements on a commercial scale" means any infringement of an intellectual property right committed to obtain a commercial advantage; this would exclude acts carried out by private users for personal and not for profit purposes;
Everybody is talking but nobody read the actual legislation. I know, I know, I'm not that new here on Slashdot, but it is still amazing the ammount of ignorance that can be derived from so few people.
On ThePirateBay case (and other trackers), as on other non-profit P2P means, it is exactly what the abbreviation means, Peer to Peer, two (or more people) making private copies.
Except for some bits, the whole language of this legislation is to harmonize E.U. law in order to improve the fight against counterfeiting.
Exactly, and it shows how much editorialized is Slashdot these days, trying to make everyone else look worse so U.S. doesn't look so bad. Take a look at this other submission, in the firehose:
andyteleco writes "Yesterday, 25/04/2007, the European Parliament voted in favour of a proposal to modify the EU Parliament and Congress directive regarding penal measures destined to enforce Intellectual Property rights. the directive finally establishes in Article 3 that the member states will be responsible of considering as a criminal infraction all intentional IP offences committed at a commercial scale, as well as complicity and/or incitement to these offences. According to Amendment 13, Article 2 of the directive excludes culpability of the acts performed by private users for personal non-profit usage. Read the entire text"
So now E.U. citizens have the explicit right to make private copies for personal non-profit usage (something in line with the Betamax decision on U.S.), but infringement, complicity and incitement to infringement on commercial scale now holds harsher penalties. Slashdot groupthink like to imagine that they are the center of the world, and every piece of legislation is there to restrict their freedom, is aimed to them but in fact, this legislation main target is not even technological "IP" infringement, but good and old school counterfeiting of goods like clothes, bag and perfumes, that happens to be a big issue to France, for instance.
I'm all for both freedom for private personal copies and jail penalty for petty criminals that sell counterfeit CDs, DVDs and Dolce&Galbanna clothes on flea markets. The fact that this legislation could be interpreted as bad for the likes of YouTube is purely incidental, a side effect that can or cannot be interpreted this way. Now, cut this "MPAA bought E.U." bullshit. You nerds are not the center of the world, and pointing fingers to Venezuela, China, Brazil, E.U., Iran will not make U.S. problems go away.
I think what it means is that Iran poses no threat enough to justify another preemptive war, not even a "diplomatic war", and that is true. Iran is no imminent threat to the U.S. territorial sovereign and, while being a threat to Israel (as every other country surrounding that territory), U.S. preemptive armed involvement there would be another catastrophe, possibly much worse than Iraq.
Anyone that could imagine (or fabricate) Iran (or Iraq, as it was being claimed as the reason for Gulf War II) attacking U.S. territory or other U.S. targets without warning and use that as a reason for a preemptive war deserves to be impeached and removed from office. That is, the whole higher echelon of the U.S. executive power.
Yes, that's true, but just in theory. In practice, if you want to vote for nobody you can cast a blank (or void) vote (on your own electoral district) and, if you don't want to vote, you can fill a form to justify your absence, for free, anywhere, until 60 days after the election, providing any reason except "I didn't want to vote". Usually people choose the "I was out of my electoral district" even if it would mean being out of town, or in the other side of the town. And, even if you don't do it and choose to pay the fine, it is less than 5 dollars.
Besides that, in Brazil, voting day is always Sunday, so nobody has to skip work to vote. Mandatory voting is a clever strategy to ensure that laziness will not stand on the way of the democracy. There is something there that U.S. could learn from.
Well, good lucky bringing democracy to Brasil. Because (don't they teach history and geography around there? wherever there is), Brazil is already a democracy, and a strong one too. The current president, Lula, just won the second term receiving impressive 58.2 million votes, after winning his first term with 56.7 million votes, for a population of around 180 million people.
Compare that with 50.4 million votes for Bush on his first term, and 62 million votes on his second term, to measure the strength of Brazilian democracy, taking in account that, differently from U.S.A, not only there are more than 2 effective parties in Brazil but any candidate from any party appears equally on the ballots in the whole federal territory.
Add that to a nationwide deployed electronic voting system (even in the middle of the amazon forest there is electronic voting) that really works, and you can understand how much Brazilian people trust the electoral process there, unlike U.S.A.
I cannot speak for India (that happen to be a democracy too, afaik), but at least Brazil needs no help from U.S. Actually, the more far away U.S. gets from Latin America democracies, the better (go lookup "Operation Condor" and "Escuela de las americas" to understand how U.S. undermine Latin American democracies in the past).
Canada is also already one of the big players, and a very nice one too. One of the biggest economies of the world, fierce enough to have entered both world wars as soon as Britain did, but peaceful enough to stay out of most of the conflicts the rest of the world got involved afterwards.
I didn't mentioned the current top dogs because then can't go higher, they are already at the top. But Brasil, India, China, Australia, South Africa, all these countries still have an unfulfilled potential, and I hope that in the next decades they will get their act straight and rise to the place they are supposed to be.
Good lucky bombing big and populous countries like:
China: Most populated country, 3rd biggest country in territory, 2nd GDP
India: 2nd most populated, 7th biggest in territory, 4th GDP
Brasil: 5th most populated, 5th biggest in territory, 10th GDP
Even if indiscriminately nuking these countries (all of them reportedly with nuclear capabilities) would not ensure Mutual Assured Destruction, the aftermath of this unlikely event would be disastrous for U.S. and worldwide economy in general, and the current politic of alliances would pit the world in another World War, but this time involving the southern hemisphere too. Just think about it: any of these 3 countries mentioned above are bigger than the whole Europe (minus Russia).
Well, I don't know if in a multilateral world (as opposed to the Bi-polarized Cold War world) there is space to the concept of "Superpower" anymore, but if there is (along with India and China), Brazil, South Africa and Australia stands a chance too. A lot of economic and technological development happening barely unnoticed south of the equator too.
Well, don't this sounds ignorant? At least funny it does:D
Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got... an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.
[...] They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of tubes. And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Yeah, I don't think so either. Knowing that the right to tell the government wrongdoing exists is not comfort enough for me, and shouldn't be for you too.
Btw, bloggers in Egypt are being arrested, did you know? Isn't is at least as bad as in Cuba? Why is U.S. still ally with Egypt? No embargo, no sanction, no nothing? What about Pakistani and foreign jornalists being arrested on Pakistan too? Won't U.S. do something about that, apart from being a steady ally in the "global war on terror"? Why there is no indignation on U.S. media, on U.S. people about that? Castro or Chavez sneezes and people make such a fuzz, while U.S. treats "Soviet" China as one of the most valuable trade partners.
You people are being treated like cattle, taught to look at the wrong way, at the wrong "enemies", an invented Goldstein for you to vent your daily Two Minutes of Hate.
the horrors committed can be uncovered and pointed to and learned from.
Yeah, right. Because in the free world, the government gladly admits when they take rights away from their people, never issuing gag orders or hiding behind national security excuses or simply (re)classifying information. Right.
What does reportedly loyal means exactly? Ann Coulter loyal? Rush Limbaugh loyal? Rupert Murdoch loyal? How is this different from the rest of the world, except that is happens "in soviet russia"? I'm seeing a new trend on media, slashdot and comments of reporting the other side mistakes that happen to be the exact same things that are happening on this side too, for instance, Unmaned vehicles on Venezuela (happens on U.S. and U.K. too), Cuba, Russia, Venezuela, China, Brazil...
Is this some kind of feel good measure, to help you people to feel better about the current situation of your countries? Because it will not help. Because that's the blind leading the blind situation, people over there publish about your errors, you people publish about their errors, everybody is too busy pointing fingers that nobody is left to fight for the country they are living in.
That's pure media distraction, get over it, fix your country first (whatever it is) and then help other countries to find the path to nirvana. Don't buy everything media feeds you, that's exactly what you are pointing on this very article that is happening in the "other side". And specially U.S., while you are letting your government to play World Police, you are losing both the respect the rest of the world had for you and the very freedoms and values that generated that respect in the first place. Get your act straight first.
McCarthy victims: "The number imprisoned is in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs.[42] In many cases, simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other committees was sufficient cause to be fired.[43] (...) Suspected homosexuality was also a common cause for being targeted by McCarthyism. According to some scholars, this resulted in more persecutions than did alleged connection with Communism"
Reagan victims: The Contra part of the Iran-Contra affair was particularly ugly.
It is easy to point fingers when one ignores that the very history of the United States is filled with prejudice, segregation and selective rights. It is easy to call themselves the "land of free" as long as you are not Native American or Black or Woman or Communist or Latin, or Arab or Muslim.
Every single event I portrait in the above links happened in the previous century, it is very likely that it has happened in your grandfathers and grandmothers lifetimes, it is not something that happened in the middle ages. United States endorsed (not to say practiced) torture (and still does), lynching, forced expropriation, outlawed a party (that was and still is legitimate all around in the rest of the so called "free world"), took away rights based only on the gender and color of the skin.
Now, because (and only because) economic interests from U.S. companies and citizens were hurt by Castro regime change such hatred is passed to you, american citizens, that are willing to forgive everything U.S. does and has done in the past but will never ever let go what Castro regime did. Hell, U.S. is even a declared partner of other (worse) dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, for instance, and I don't see the same level of outrage that people displays against Cuba.
Although I am all for a better world without unjust imprisonments, torture, state terrorism and all that, U.S. people should think carefully when criticizing because those in glass houses shouldn't be throwing stones.
Slashdot Mirror
Btw, I agree that software (and ideas, in general) should not and must not be patentable. But STFU and read the legislation first, comment later. I doesn't take a lawyer to understand it, only anyone with minimal english reading capabilities.
Anyway, the kind of people that would need this amount of details is the same people (and I telling that by personal experience, I performed help desk duties on my former programming job) that would need instructions like this, to install a typical setup.exe: "Open the Windows Explorer. No, not the Internet Explorer, Windows Explorer. Click on Start, Programs, Windows Explorer. Can't find it? Press the key with Windows Logo and "E" simulaneously. GO to C:\Program Files\<My Company Name>. How? Click on the little cross next to the folder called C:. Then click Program Files. Tell it to show the content of this folder anyway. Click on <My Company Name>. Double click setup.exe. Click on Next, select I Agree and click Next, Next, Next, Finish"
It took quite a time for the average people to get used to the Next->I Agree->Next->Next->Next->Finish kind of installation, and now it is muscular memory, a simply reflex on most Windows users memory. They don't even read the fine print anymore, and that explains how a lot of people got/get spyware installed along with Kazaa and alike (die Bonzy Buddy, die!). Given enough time, new migrated ubuntu users will get used to synaptics, and "Add and Remove Programs" (that is even easier than Synaptics) and, if the right wind blows, even eventually opening the terminal and making things much easier for them (and for us poor technical people too).
There are some important parts there, that helps to clarify and protect private copying, while harmonizing the legislation among the members states to fight the real threat that this legislation aims: counterfeiting of real world trademarked and copyrighted goods. Here are some important parts of this amendments:
Now, again, let's comment on that. How is that bad for fair use, private copying, etc? It is exactly THE OPPOSITE of what is being stated in the summary of this article, it defines explicitly fair use, right to private copying and creates a legal framework for the IP holders to be able to assert their rights, while protecting the citizens against baseless suits.
And, as a side effect of that, it legalizes the legal parallel importing of goods, making the ones like Lik Sung (sic) to be able to operate on E.U. territory. See below:
Everybody is talking but nobody read the actual legislation. I know, I know, I'm not that new here on Slashdot, but it is still amazing the ammount of ignorance that can be derived from so few people.
On ThePirateBay case (and other trackers), as on other non-profit P2P means, it is exactly what the abbreviation means, Peer to Peer, two (or more people) making private copies.
Except for some bits, the whole language of this legislation is to harmonize E.U. law in order to improve the fight against counterfeiting.
So now E.U. citizens have the explicit right to make private copies for personal non-profit usage (something in line with the Betamax decision on U.S.), but infringement, complicity and incitement to infringement on commercial scale now holds harsher penalties. Slashdot groupthink like to imagine that they are the center of the world, and every piece of legislation is there to restrict their freedom, is aimed to them but in fact, this legislation main target is not even technological "IP" infringement, but good and old school counterfeiting of goods like clothes, bag and perfumes, that happens to be a big issue to France, for instance.
I'm all for both freedom for private personal copies and jail penalty for petty criminals that sell counterfeit CDs, DVDs and Dolce&Galbanna clothes on flea markets. The fact that this legislation could be interpreted as bad for the likes of YouTube is purely incidental, a side effect that can or cannot be interpreted this way. Now, cut this "MPAA bought E.U." bullshit. You nerds are not the center of the world, and pointing fingers to Venezuela, China, Brazil, E.U., Iran will not make U.S. problems go away.
I think what it means is that Iran poses no threat enough to justify another preemptive war, not even a "diplomatic war", and that is true. Iran is no imminent threat to the U.S. territorial sovereign and, while being a threat to Israel (as every other country surrounding that territory), U.S. preemptive armed involvement there would be another catastrophe, possibly much worse than Iraq.
Anyone that could imagine (or fabricate) Iran (or Iraq, as it was being claimed as the reason for Gulf War II) attacking U.S. territory or other U.S. targets without warning and use that as a reason for a preemptive war deserves to be impeached and removed from office. That is, the whole higher echelon of the U.S. executive power.
Yes it does. And it was GPL, as it's said in TFA. So, no dual license if it is included.
Yes, that's true, but just in theory. In practice, if you want to vote for nobody you can cast a blank (or void) vote (on your own electoral district) and, if you don't want to vote, you can fill a form to justify your absence, for free, anywhere, until 60 days after the election, providing any reason except "I didn't want to vote". Usually people choose the "I was out of my electoral district" even if it would mean being out of town, or in the other side of the town. And, even if you don't do it and choose to pay the fine, it is less than 5 dollars.
Besides that, in Brazil, voting day is always Sunday, so nobody has to skip work to vote. Mandatory voting is a clever strategy to ensure that laziness will not stand on the way of the democracy. There is something there that U.S. could learn from.
Well, good lucky bringing democracy to Brasil. Because (don't they teach history and geography around there? wherever there is), Brazil is already a democracy, and a strong one too. The current president, Lula, just won the second term receiving impressive 58.2 million votes, after winning his first term with 56.7 million votes, for a population of around 180 million people.
Compare that with 50.4 million votes for Bush on his first term, and 62 million votes on his second term, to measure the strength of Brazilian democracy, taking in account that, differently from U.S.A, not only there are more than 2 effective parties in Brazil but any candidate from any party appears equally on the ballots in the whole federal territory.
Add that to a nationwide deployed electronic voting system (even in the middle of the amazon forest there is electronic voting) that really works, and you can understand how much Brazilian people trust the electoral process there, unlike U.S.A.
I cannot speak for India (that happen to be a democracy too, afaik), but at least Brazil needs no help from U.S. Actually, the more far away U.S. gets from Latin America democracies, the better (go lookup "Operation Condor" and "Escuela de las americas" to understand how U.S. undermine Latin American democracies in the past).
Canada is also already one of the big players, and a very nice one too. One of the biggest economies of the world, fierce enough to have entered both world wars as soon as Britain did, but peaceful enough to stay out of most of the conflicts the rest of the world got involved afterwards.
I didn't mentioned the current top dogs because then can't go higher, they are already at the top. But Brasil, India, China, Australia, South Africa, all these countries still have an unfulfilled potential, and I hope that in the next decades they will get their act straight and rise to the place they are supposed to be.
I said *reportedly* nuclear capabilities.
Even if indiscriminately nuking these countries (all of them reportedly with nuclear capabilities) would not ensure Mutual Assured Destruction, the aftermath of this unlikely event would be disastrous for U.S. and worldwide economy in general, and the current politic of alliances would pit the world in another World War, but this time involving the southern hemisphere too. Just think about it: any of these 3 countries mentioned above are bigger than the whole Europe (minus Russia).
I left E.U., Japan, U.S. and Russia out because they are already major players.
Well, I don't know if in a multilateral world (as opposed to the Bi-polarized Cold War world) there is space to the concept of "Superpower" anymore, but if there is (along with India and China), Brazil, South Africa and Australia stands a chance too. A lot of economic and technological development happening barely unnoticed south of the equator too.
Do they really need to ask anything?
Q: At what point has/will the EU overstepped its bounds?
A: Is it really necessary that every Slashdot summary ends with a very polarizing question?
Damned Buzzard! I hope Woodpecker alert the authorities about this well known con. How dare he!
Let's see if I got it right. Freedom of speech on a BLOG, safe in the anonymity of my alias, living in a foreign country far far away from the States trumps freedom of peaceful assembly, right to a speedy and public trial, right to not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, and, of course, as I linked above, freedom of speech. Is it right?
Yeah, I don't think so either. Knowing that the right to tell the government wrongdoing exists is not comfort enough for me, and shouldn't be for you too.
Btw, bloggers in Egypt are being arrested, did you know? Isn't is at least as bad as in Cuba? Why is U.S. still ally with Egypt? No embargo, no sanction, no nothing? What about Pakistani and foreign jornalists being arrested on Pakistan too? Won't U.S. do something about that, apart from being a steady ally in the "global war on terror"? Why there is no indignation on U.S. media, on U.S. people about that? Castro or Chavez sneezes and people make such a fuzz, while U.S. treats "Soviet" China as one of the most valuable trade partners.
You people are being treated like cattle, taught to look at the wrong way, at the wrong "enemies", an invented Goldstein for you to vent your daily Two Minutes of Hate.
Yeah, because being a high ranked intelligence official is enough to pervert any president's mind.
What does reportedly loyal means exactly? Ann Coulter loyal? Rush Limbaugh loyal? Rupert Murdoch loyal? How is this different from the rest of the world, except that is happens "in soviet russia"? I'm seeing a new trend on media, slashdot and comments of reporting the other side mistakes that happen to be the exact same things that are happening on this side too, for instance, Unmaned vehicles on Venezuela (happens on U.S. and U.K. too), Cuba, Russia, Venezuela, China, Brazil ...
Is this some kind of feel good measure, to help you people to feel better about the current situation of your countries? Because it will not help. Because that's the blind leading the blind situation, people over there publish about your errors, you people publish about their errors, everybody is too busy pointing fingers that nobody is left to fight for the country they are living in.
That's pure media distraction, get over it, fix your country first (whatever it is) and then help other countries to find the path to nirvana. Don't buy everything media feeds you, that's exactly what you are pointing on this very article that is happening in the "other side". And specially U.S., while you are letting your government to play World Police, you are losing both the respect the rest of the world had for you and the very freedoms and values that generated that respect in the first place. Get your act straight first.
Yeah, all right. What about:
McCarthy victims: "The number imprisoned is in the hundreds, and some ten or twelve thousand lost their jobs.[42] In many cases, simply being subpoenaed by HUAC or one of the other committees was sufficient cause to be fired.[43] (...) Suspected homosexuality was also a common cause for being targeted by McCarthyism. According to some scholars, this resulted in more persecutions than did alleged connection with Communism"
Reagan victims: The Contra part of the Iran-Contra affair was particularly ugly. It is easy to point fingers when one ignores that the very history of the United States is filled with prejudice, segregation and selective rights. It is easy to call themselves the "land of free" as long as you are not Native American or Black or Woman or Communist or Latin, or Arab or Muslim.
Every single event I portrait in the above links happened in the previous century, it is very likely that it has happened in your grandfathers and grandmothers lifetimes, it is not something that happened in the middle ages. United States endorsed (not to say practiced) torture (and still does), lynching, forced expropriation, outlawed a party (that was and still is legitimate all around in the rest of the so called "free world"), took away rights based only on the gender and color of the skin.
Now, because (and only because) economic interests from U.S. companies and citizens were hurt by Castro regime change such hatred is passed to you, american citizens, that are willing to forgive everything U.S. does and has done in the past but will never ever let go what Castro regime did. Hell, U.S. is even a declared partner of other (worse) dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, for instance, and I don't see the same level of outrage that people displays against Cuba.
Although I am all for a better world without unjust imprisonments, torture, state terrorism and all that, U.S. people should think carefully when criticizing because those in glass houses shouldn't be throwing stones.
Damned tricky prepositions! Haha