Demonization and banning of opposition parties, jailing of political opponents, suppression of free press.
Pretty much by the numbers totalitarian rule.
Happening here in Brazil also, we already have #1 and #2. #3 will never happen because the Brazilian media always preferred to blowjob the government as long it keeps taxes over press paper zeroed, pays media companies' debts and prevents competition from foreign news services.
Exactly. As a Brazilian, Paulista and Paulistano I also second this.
I find strange that: 1) corruption in Brazil, for these people, has just begun on January 1st, 2003 (when PT started their government) and 2) the corrupt people only are on PT and not on PSDB/DEM/name your right-wing party. Meanwhile, here on Sao Paulo state (where the same political group holds the power since 1982), we got massive corruption schemas that were never investigated: the Alston train affair, the irresponsible water management of Sao Paulo's metro area (look for "draught" and "Cantareira") and, last but not least, the case of school meals ("merenda") affair, where the food for the classmates has been sent everywhere but state schools. Mind you, the food that should had been sent to schools has been found at a deposit on a barbecue restaurant of Jundiaí (a city ~50 km from Sao Paulo).
Moreover, the opponent of the right-wing coalition which lost the presidential elections in 2014 has also been denounced on the very same operation that is targeting Lula nowadays not less than 5 times by 5 different people, and absolutely nothing has been done against him. He has also his share of scandals to be investigated - for example, an airport built besides his farm with state money - but the media just does not give a fsck about it. Dilma's government is mediocre at best, but Aecio and his party (PSDB) have been very keen on putting out the fire with gasoline.
After the Plasma 5 fiasco, which wasn't ready for production, really, I took the plunge and switched to Kubuntu 14.04 LTS. It sucks to update your distro every 6 months, and it sucks even more to update distros having the feeling that one is in permanent beta. Nowadays I don't care about "beautiful desktop" and bells and whistles in general, I just need a stable and working environment.
Still thinking what to do with wifey's notebook, though. But I'll probably go through the same route.
Meet the Schürmanns. They circumnavigated the whole world - twice! - while raising their children aboard their boats. One of them stayed on board for 10 continuous years, something that didn't keep him from graduating in the USA. Their daughter, Kat Schürmann, has been adopted from a Australian-Brazilian couple who died of AIDS - she was HIV-positive herself, and that didn't keep them from traveling around the world. Her mother wrote a very emotive memento about her life with Kat, which unfortunately is only available in Portuguese.
In Brazil you download two pieces of software: one for filling with your earnings, assets, properties and deductions and other for transmitting the data.
You have to fill the address form if you're doing your taxes for the first time, and whenever you change addresses. As for marriage, you can declare all the couple's properties in just one form, or spread the properties among the couple.
The software will then calculate if it's better for you to use the "standard deduction" or the full declaration.
All the process can be followed through the web and you can perform corrections either by web site or using the same software - which runs in all operating systems, linux included.
If you don't want much hassle, just use explore2fs (http://www.chrysocome.net/explore2fs). It's an userland application which does not install any drivers or the like on Windows, and as such will execute as any user. However, you'll still need to transport it to the machines you'll want to use, and thus you'll need a tiny space of FAT32 for doing the trick.
If you have rights to install drivers on the windows machines you use, you can try the EXT2 driver available on www.fs-driver.org. It will mount your EXT2/EXT3 volume as a drive letter so you can transfer files between partitions.
Agreed. I'm brasilian and I've left Orkut because most of brasilian users didn't respected the rules of most non-portuguese speaking communities. Most of the communities I took place were in english, and guess what - it was just a matter of time for people appearing and discussing subjects in portuguese. Bah.
I don't discuss today as I did 10 years ago, but what the heck. Usenet is still alive.
First of all, the fact that 40 minutes later this article got no comments is a very interesting signal. Perhaps most geeks are asking themselves whether isn't this just one more honeypot from Sun.
Personally, I think the Open/Free/Libre community should act simultaneously in two fronts:
1) Continue to fight DRM with the partners that already are engaged in it (EFF, GNU Foundation comes to mind);
2) At least, take a look on Sun's proposal, not only on grounds of maximizing the limited rights DRM gives to the users but also on grounds of interoperability with the industry, something that will allow a deeper penetration of OSS solutions for Mom, Dad & Grandma.
For me, I'm not even thinking about getting a DVD-Audio, Blu-Ray, HD-DVD in the next 5 years, so this is a non-issue for me for the time being. CD-A, DVD-video and MP3 fill all of my needs right now, and they are sufficiently open formats that I can read with my Linux machine right now.
Finally, Sun is still a powerful behemoth, but personally I doubt that they have the same power as M$ in the customer market to seduce media content corporations and device makers.
I don't think that LaserDisc has been a "failure" by any standards. There is a plethora of titles that haven't been never released on LaserDisc, and perhaps never will.
Here in Brasil all local stations gave massive reports on the catastrophe: morning, afternoon and evening news. BandNews, our local CNN, gives it full alternate blocks of news every hour - that means, of 4 blocks of news shown during 60 minutes, 15 are dedicated exclusively to the incidents.
This happens because there are more brasilians going to Thailand that you could imagine - Jeez, I haven't no idea that there were that many brasilians down there! And before someone calls this a selfish reasoning, there are brasilian people that voluntarized already to help people on these countries. No, it won't be a good time for them.
I'm yet to see any digital images that give the colors of diapositive film (slides). Sure, it's a bit more difficult to use, as it has a narrower error exposure margin. However, once you learn to use it you'll really never give up it.
Also, film photography doesn't rely on batteries since you learn how to photograph and use a manual camera. Also yet, the lenses of most 35 mm reflex film cameras are way better than any lens of a compact digital camera. I find absurd that the minimum aperture you can step down to in most digicams is f/8.
I'm not saying that digicams don't have their uses, but conclude that film is facing extinction just because Kodak EOLed their crappy non-disposable cameras is a little of of exaggearation for me. What the heck, an Instamatic or a Hobby are a little just more than black boxes!
I think that I moved to Mandrake at release 7.2 - RedHat was starting to look too much proprietary to me, something that recent news have confirmed.
Mandrake does include bleeding edge software, but normally it's mostly optional - you can run a real stable server system if you want to with it. I have used Mandrake as both my standard desktop (both in my computer and my wife's notebook). never got any HW detection problems. Recently I bought an USB Ethernet adapter. Just plugged it into wife's notebook USB port, it started to work. No hassles at all. Period.
Also, Mandrake is my Firewall Solution for years now, as Mandrake was the only distribution that allowed me to use my old Performa 6360 as a firewall.
If this is not important to you, or if you suggest me to use NetBSD for PPC instead, forget it. The 6360 has no video/kdb console accessible and so I had to use the serial console directly - which had instability problems and became completed frozen up from hour to hour.
"But you can connect from the network!"
Nope. The network driver couldn't contact my little ethernet network, and locked up the entire machine. And I don't use RealCrap cards in this server, but an ANA-6922TX card.
So, I,ve tried Mandrake as Yellow Dog didn't install; LinuxPPC was fine but had a pretty outdated selection of packages. I'm glad I've done this.
Now, if I just could find one or two 32 MB memory DIMMs for the Performa to replace my two 16 MB DIMMs...
I don't know how difficult they are to find in the U.S., but I think that any Minolta M/MC/MD camera is great to start with.
There is plenty of great lenses at bargain price -for instance, 50 mm f:1.4 costs less than US$ 30 here in Brazil. There are also other lenses that are hard to find in most AF systems (Minolta Maxxum included), like a 135mm f:2.8. I've seen great Kalimar lenses of this kind for M/MC/MD for US$ 50-75. Try to find a comparable lens for your AF system and just see how much they cost.
I've got my SRT303b (minimum shutter speed 1/1000, DOF preview, with optional aperture-priority mode) with a 28mm f:3.5, 50mm f:1.4, 80-200mm f:4, flash, tripod and case for less than US$ 200.
Finally, this camera is built as iron tank, so it will withstand all kinds of weather - something that won't happen with modern SLR's, digital and film. And it will shot even without batteries.
These benchmarks have been run with Reiser 4 which, AFAIK, is not shipped by default with no Linux distribution. Even Mandrake guys, who are fond of experimental software on their distributions hasn't included Reiser 4 on Mdk9.2. Most distributions include 3.6.28, IINM.
OTOH, I've been using XFS to store and edit 36-bit film scans (40+ MB file sizes) and XFS has been serving me extremely well, without data corruption of any kind - differently from Reiser 3, which needs a reiserfsck every time I boot Win2k (not that this happens very often).
Finally, according to Oracle, even ext3 blows ReiserFS 3 off the water:
Ditto. EMI is issuing some remasters of really great brazilian music albums on discs that feature copy "protection". The quotes refer to the fact that CDParanoia and my CD-RW drive (LG 8081B) could read the discs without any kind of hassles. All their tracks are already.WAV files inside my Hard Disk.
However, my other CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive DRD8160 couldn't read the CD's at all, so it's a matter of hardware/software combination.
It's already happening in Brazil.
on
Database Nation
·
· Score: 2
I've tried to post a history weeks before, about part of this scenario becoming a reality here in Brazil. It hasn't been accepted here at slashdot, but it's live and well at www.kuro5hin.org, under the title Brazil, a new "Database Nation"?. It has a description of a system developed in Brazil that cross-check data from 3000+ data sources, returning both your entire credit and consumer report (including address, telephone and monthly income) and a credit ranking which will tell how and how much credit you'll be able to take. All of this just with your name. The article has some links (in portuguese) that you may want to translate using your favorite translation tool.
Hmmm... Lying and chatting in this case should be judged not on absolute grounds but more on grounds on civil disobedience. I wouldn't hesitate in breking the law whenever this law jeopardized my very human and natural rights, namely the one of personal judgement.
Gandhi would never get India's independence if, in some moments, he hadn't chosen to go against estabilished laws. Breaking the laws, in this case, was a pre-requisite to a greater objective, namely the liberty of India from the Britain Empire.
Besides, most of the behaviours we see today as normal, or at least tolerated (e.g. sex before marriage and homossexualism, for instance) were once illegal, what hasn't stopped people of making sex before marriage or having homossexual relations.
Finally, if the christians want to pray in school, why not allow also the buddhists to do the same thing? Or the muslims? Or even the satanists? The problem I see with your reasoning is that only one religion is OK - yours. Your belief is that God only should guide our behaviour. My belief is that the Man has the means to be as moral as a good christian would be, even if he/she is not a Christian.
BTW - I've been a christian some time ago, and I've called it quits because the narrow-minded people that wanted me to think their way, and not mine.
Re:Is there any reason to stay with the 2.0.x seri
on
Linux 2.0.37 Released
·
· Score: 1
If you want to use FreeS/WAN (an IPSEC implementation on top of Linux for building secure VPN's), you'll have to grab 2.0.3x because the package hasn't been ported to Kernel 2.2.x yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Demonization and banning of opposition parties, jailing of political opponents, suppression of free press.
Pretty much by the numbers totalitarian rule.
Happening here in Brazil also, we already have #1 and #2. #3 will never happen because the Brazilian media always preferred to blowjob the government as long it keeps taxes over press paper zeroed, pays media companies' debts and prevents competition from foreign news services.
Exactly. As a Brazilian, Paulista and Paulistano I also second this.
I find strange that: 1) corruption in Brazil, for these people, has just begun on January 1st, 2003 (when PT started their government) and 2) the corrupt people only are on PT and not on PSDB/DEM/name your right-wing party. Meanwhile, here on Sao Paulo state (where the same political group holds the power since 1982), we got massive corruption schemas that were never investigated: the Alston train affair, the irresponsible water management of Sao Paulo's metro area (look for "draught" and "Cantareira") and, last but not least, the case of school meals ("merenda") affair, where the food for the classmates has been sent everywhere but state schools. Mind you, the food that should had been sent to schools has been found at a deposit on a barbecue restaurant of Jundiaí (a city ~50 km from Sao Paulo).
Moreover, the opponent of the right-wing coalition which lost the presidential elections in 2014 has also been denounced on the very same operation that is targeting Lula nowadays not less than 5 times by 5 different people, and absolutely nothing has been done against him. He has also his share of scandals to be investigated - for example, an airport built besides his farm with state money - but the media just does not give a fsck about it. Dilma's government is mediocre at best, but Aecio and his party (PSDB) have been very keen on putting out the fire with gasoline.
After the Plasma 5 fiasco, which wasn't ready for production, really, I took the plunge and switched to Kubuntu 14.04 LTS. It sucks to update your distro every 6 months, and it sucks even more to update distros having the feeling that one is in permanent beta. Nowadays I don't care about "beautiful desktop" and bells and whistles in general, I just need a stable and working environment. Still thinking what to do with wifey's notebook, though. But I'll probably go through the same route.
Meet the Schürmanns. They circumnavigated the whole world - twice! - while raising their children aboard their boats. One of them stayed on board for 10 continuous years, something that didn't keep him from graduating in the USA. Their daughter, Kat Schürmann, has been adopted from a Australian-Brazilian couple who died of AIDS - she was HIV-positive herself, and that didn't keep them from traveling around the world. Her mother wrote a very emotive memento about her life with Kat, which unfortunately is only available in Portuguese.
In Brazil you download two pieces of software: one for filling with your earnings, assets, properties and deductions and other for transmitting the data. You have to fill the address form if you're doing your taxes for the first time, and whenever you change addresses. As for marriage, you can declare all the couple's properties in just one form, or spread the properties among the couple. The software will then calculate if it's better for you to use the "standard deduction" or the full declaration. All the process can be followed through the web and you can perform corrections either by web site or using the same software - which runs in all operating systems, linux included.
If you don't want much hassle, just use explore2fs (http://www.chrysocome.net/explore2fs). It's an userland application which does not install any drivers or the like on Windows, and as such will execute as any user. However, you'll still need to transport it to the machines you'll want to use, and thus you'll need a tiny space of FAT32 for doing the trick.
If you have rights to install drivers on the windows machines you use, you can try the EXT2 driver available on www.fs-driver.org. It will mount your EXT2/EXT3 volume as a drive letter so you can transfer files between partitions.
Agreed. I'm brasilian and I've left Orkut because most of brasilian users didn't respected the rules of most non-portuguese speaking communities. Most of the communities I took place were in english, and guess what - it was just a matter of time for people appearing and discussing subjects in portuguese. Bah.
I don't discuss today as I did 10 years ago, but what the heck. Usenet is still alive.
Three-letter answer: LVM.
Four-letter answer: EVMS.
Personally, I think the Open/Free/Libre community should act simultaneously in two fronts:
1) Continue to fight DRM with the partners that already are engaged in it (EFF, GNU Foundation comes to mind);
2) At least, take a look on Sun's proposal, not only on grounds of maximizing the limited rights DRM gives to the users but also on grounds of interoperability with the industry, something that will allow a deeper penetration of OSS solutions for Mom, Dad & Grandma.
For me, I'm not even thinking about getting a DVD-Audio, Blu-Ray, HD-DVD in the next 5 years, so this is a non-issue for me for the time being. CD-A, DVD-video and MP3 fill all of my needs right now, and they are sufficiently open formats that I can read with my Linux machine right now.
Finally, Sun is still a powerful behemoth, but personally I doubt that they have the same power as M$ in the customer market to seduce media content corporations and device makers.
I don't think that LaserDisc has been a "failure" by any standards. There is a plethora of titles that haven't been never released on LaserDisc, and perhaps never will.
Here in Brasil all local stations gave massive reports on the catastrophe: morning, afternoon and evening news. BandNews, our local CNN, gives it full alternate blocks of news every hour - that means, of 4 blocks of news shown during 60 minutes, 15 are dedicated exclusively to the incidents.
This happens because there are more brasilians going to Thailand that you could imagine - Jeez, I haven't no idea that there were that many brasilians down there! And before someone calls this a selfish reasoning, there are brasilian people that voluntarized already to help people on these countries. No, it won't be a good time for them.
[]'s
Paulão
I'm yet to see any digital images that give the colors of diapositive film (slides). Sure, it's a bit more difficult to use, as it has a narrower error exposure margin. However, once you learn to use it you'll really never give up it.
Also, film photography doesn't rely on batteries since you learn how to photograph and use a manual camera. Also yet, the lenses of most 35 mm reflex film cameras are way better than any lens of a compact digital camera. I find absurd that the minimum aperture you can step down to in most digicams is f/8.
I'm not saying that digicams don't have their uses, but conclude that film is facing extinction just because Kodak EOLed their crappy non-disposable cameras is a little of of exaggearation for me. What the heck, an Instamatic or a Hobby are a little just more than black boxes!
I think that I moved to Mandrake at release 7.2 - RedHat was starting to look too much proprietary to me, something that recent news have confirmed.
Mandrake does include bleeding edge software, but normally it's mostly optional - you can run a real stable server system if you want to with it. I have used Mandrake as both my standard desktop (both in my computer and my wife's notebook). never got any HW detection problems. Recently I bought an USB Ethernet adapter. Just plugged it into wife's notebook USB port, it started to work. No hassles at all. Period.
Also, Mandrake is my Firewall Solution for years now, as Mandrake was the only distribution that allowed me to use my old Performa 6360 as a firewall.
If this is not important to you, or if you suggest me to use NetBSD for PPC instead, forget it. The 6360 has no video/kdb console accessible and so I had to use the serial console directly - which had instability problems and became completed frozen up from hour to hour.
"But you can connect from the network!"
Nope. The network driver couldn't contact my little ethernet network, and locked up the entire machine. And I don't use RealCrap cards in this server, but an ANA-6922TX card.
So, I,ve tried Mandrake as Yellow Dog didn't install; LinuxPPC was fine but had a pretty outdated selection of packages. I'm glad I've done this.
Now, if I just could find one or two 32 MB memory DIMMs for the Performa to replace my two 16 MB DIMMs...
I don't know how difficult they are to find in the U.S., but I think that any Minolta M/MC/MD camera is great to start with.
There is plenty of great lenses at bargain price -for instance, 50 mm f:1.4 costs less than US$ 30 here in Brazil. There are also other lenses that are hard to find in most AF systems (Minolta Maxxum included), like a 135mm f:2.8. I've seen great Kalimar lenses of this kind for M/MC/MD for US$ 50-75. Try to find a comparable lens for your AF system and just see how much they cost.
I've got my SRT303b (minimum shutter speed 1/1000, DOF preview, with optional aperture-priority mode) with a 28mm f:3.5, 50mm f:1.4, 80-200mm f:4, flash, tripod and case for less than US$ 200.
Finally, this camera is built as iron tank, so it will withstand all kinds of weather - something that won't happen with modern SLR's, digital and film. And it will shot even without batteries.
OTOH, I've been using XFS to store and edit 36-bit film scans (40+ MB file sizes) and XFS has been serving me extremely well, without data corruption of any kind - differently from Reiser 3, which needs a reiserfsck every time I boot Win2k (not that this happens very often).
Finally, according to Oracle, even ext3 blows ReiserFS 3 off the water:
http://otn.oracle.com/oramag/webcolumns/2002/techa rticles/scalzo_linux02.html
--------
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free - after all, I use Mandrake Linux!
Get my public PGP signature at http://www.paulo.fessel.nom.br
Ditto. EMI is issuing some remasters of really great brazilian music albums on discs that feature copy "protection". The quotes refer to the fact that CDParanoia and my CD-RW drive (LG 8081B) could read the discs without any kind of hassles. All their tracks are already .WAV files inside my Hard Disk.
However, my other CD-ROM/DVD-ROM drive DRD8160 couldn't read the CD's at all, so it's a matter of hardware/software combination.
I've tried to post a history weeks before, about
part of this scenario becoming a reality here in Brazil.
It hasn't been accepted here at slashdot, but it's live and
well at www.kuro5hin.org, under the title Brazil, a new "Database Nation"?. It has a description of a system developed in Brazil that cross-check data from 3000+ data sources, returning both your entire credit and consumer report (including address, telephone and monthly income) and a credit ranking which will tell how and how much credit you'll be able to take. All of this just with your name. The article has some links (in portuguese) that you may want to translate using your favorite translation tool.
P.
Hmmm... Lying and chatting in this case should be judged not on absolute grounds but more on grounds on civil disobedience. I wouldn't hesitate in breking the law whenever this law jeopardized my very human and natural rights, namely the one of personal judgement.
Gandhi would never get India's independence if, in some moments, he hadn't chosen to go against estabilished laws. Breaking the laws, in this case, was a pre-requisite to a greater objective, namely the liberty of India from the Britain Empire.
Besides, most of the behaviours we see today as normal, or at least tolerated (e.g. sex before marriage and homossexualism, for instance) were once illegal, what hasn't stopped people of making sex before marriage or having homossexual relations.
Finally, if the christians want to pray in school, why not allow also the buddhists to do the same thing? Or the muslims? Or even the satanists? The problem I see with your reasoning is that only one religion is OK - yours. Your belief is that God only should guide our behaviour. My belief is that the Man has the means to be as moral as a good christian would be, even if he/she is not a Christian.
BTW - I've been a christian some time ago, and I've called it quits because the narrow-minded people that wanted me to think their way, and not mine.
If you want to use FreeS/WAN (an IPSEC implementation on top of Linux for building secure VPN's), you'll
have to grab 2.0.3x because the package hasn't been ported to Kernel 2.2.x yet.
Paulão