H1B is not taking your jobs, Outsourcing is.
Workers under H1B may be appealing to some degree because they are cheaper and more over-workable, but they can be counted in the thousands, and they still help the economy by spending what they earn.
Outsourced jobs, on the other hand, are in the millions and much more appealing economically to large companies. There's several millions of outsourced jobs, not only in India, but also taken by Chinese, east Europeans, Russians and Latin Americans.
Also the tale that foreigners are less talented and that Americans should be hired instead is no longer relevant, the same way that china raised it's production standards the rest of the world is doing the same and each year there's more and more companies with excellent track records ready for outsorcing jobs from US and Euro companies.
This is the real effect of globalization and opening trade. Rich countries thought they could own poorer countries by forcing them to compete equally and purchase their goods while providing cheap labor. This had the expected result of destroying most of the local industry in such countries and forcing them to rely on imports. However, no one expected the software industry to become so relevant worldwide. Cheap labor suddenly became cheap outsourcing, and there is no way first world workers can match the cheap costs of the third world, so this trend will continue and get worse.
It's not about talent, it's about commitment. Foreigners have to work hard to obtain a green card in the long run (something you are born with).
Workers in H1B have a higher degree of commitment and will not (or cannot) switch jobs that easily if overworked or underpaid, so they are naturally very appealing to companies (who pay for the h1b and green card).
Downloading a torrent client is not much more difficult than downloading a small app or browser extension that sets up alternate DNS lookups.
"Typical Users" can learn..
That argument sounds meaningful, until you start looking at the actual patents involved. Far far most of software patents are obvious solutions to problems, too broad, unrelated, stuff related to an obvious (only way) to implement a specification, or simply rehashing prior art. "research" sounds like wise people locked in a room where money is pumped and cool new revolutionary ideas are produced, but in reality it's just people realizing they did something just a *very sightly little bit different* than what it actually exists and getting a patent on it, which in exchange grants them way more protection and benefits than deserved.
The system is simply not designed for software patents to fit in. They are very easy to produce and even if some software patents *could* be considered as valid, reality is that far most should not and there is just not enough resources in this world to judge them all (or evena measure of how much protection must be granted in relation to how useful/revolutionary the idea is). So, in spite of a greater good, and considering the damage they are causing, we should get rid of them.
Music Genres, Descriptive or Restrictive?
Movie Genres, Descriptive or Restritive?
We all know that human beings try to fit everything into different categories as a way of discerning and understanding. This process can be positive for many things such as science, but negative in other aspects such as social (leading to racism or discrimnation). Artistic genres exist so people will watch, play or listen to something they understand, something they are most comfortable or familiarized with, or simply, that it has elements that they know they like.
It's the same as with most youngs today, they will rather listen to Justin Bieber than Led Zeppelin, it's not so much about "quality" as an objective measure, but what they are familiar and comfortable with.
The rise of casual games, I believe has more to do with games being more available in general (most people will definitely not pay $50 to play a game genre they never played). The same phenomena can be observed with music, movies and tv series thanks to piracy, which allows viewers to check out and explore new content with little effort (not waiting for a specific broadcast time, or paying for a dvd/br release), while still being able to follow trends and socialize about it.
In short, make content more accesible, and people will be more prone to leave their comfort zone..
Mod parent up, it's going straight over the Lybian coast. This confirms the point in the article about why this kind of orbits are useful. It seems that it can obtain a complete picture of the lybian coastline every a few couple of hours, something very difficult to achieve with current satellites.
What is most disturbing is that uprisings in Lybia were just begining when X37-B was launched, and it wasn't clear that a civil war broke up yet, so did the military change plans for the mission, or was all this attack on Lybia planned beforehand?
I don't understand why they focus so much on developers porting XBLA games, when they should be caring about iPhone or Android developers porting their games and applications to WP7. I can understand that they will not run Java on their system to avoid problems with oracle, but nothing avoids them from offering C++ / ObjC, which are both available on Apple and Google platforms. This allows a much larger amount of developers (and middlewares such as Unity) to offer the same on WP7 as everywhere else.
By forcing everyone to use.NET , I think developers will just keep writing their code in wathever is supported by the market leaders (Java, ObjC and C++), as they will not ditch their entire codebases to please Microsoft.
I thinks it's pretty simple if you think about it. Consumers all around the world don't see Microsoft as a true innovator in the technology business. What does this mean? It means that people does not see Microsoft products as "must-have" because of innovation, features or overall coolness.
Microsoft products become "must-have" only when they become the only platform available to run something the consumer wants. Windows (Windows applications), Office (Office documments) and X-Box (X-Box games) are the main successful Microsoft products and all three follow this lock-in scenario. Any other products, platforms or services they created (that don't depend on external content or software) were soon taken over by superior alternatives.
I think the problem is not so much about the CPU being the middle man, but the CPU having to issue every draw/state change call.
Instancing is one of the many examples about why the current model is wrong. A for() loop for drawing an object 5000 times is slow because there is a lot of cpu-gpu communication. Instancing fixes this but makes it less flexible (you cant change which arrays are drawn or most of the state between objects).
Discaimer: I am a pro game developer, wrote a few engines for commercial games, etc.
I know what this guy means and ill try to explain it a bit better.
The biggest problem with the DX model (which was inherited from GL) is the high dependency on the CPU to instruct it what to do.
State changes and draw commands are all sent from the CPU, buffered and then processed in the GPU. While this speeds up rendering considerably (the GPU is always a frame ore two behind the CPU) it makes it limiting, to get feedback from the GPU about the rendering state, and since the all the DX/GL commands are buffered, retrieving state or data means flushing/sync.
From modern algorithms related to occlusion estimation, or global illumination to overall reduction of state changes, it would benefit greatly if, for most tasks, the GPU could act by itself by running an user-made kernel that instructs it what to do (commands and state changes) instead of relying on DX, but for some reason this is not the direction GPUs are heading to, and it really doesnt make sense. Maybe Microsoft has something to do with it, but since Directx9 became the standard for game development, the API only became easier to program in versions 10 and 11, but didn't have major changes.
Copyright enforcement (to the level that US corporations are happy with) is costly in many ways. Intelligence is needed for detecting infringements, police is needed for raiding suspects and forensics, and finally judges and prosecutors are needed for each infringement case.
In developing world nations like mine (Argentina), stronger copyright laws are a total waste of taxpayers money that will only benefits foreign media producers.
Added to that, we are already short on policemen and judges (which are already underpaid) , so even if laws such as these were to pass, there would simply not be enough human resources to enforce them. Plain and simple.
The reason why watch lists such as these exist is because media lobbysts realize that countries like mine are no way as poor as, say, Nigeria, so they want a share of the pie, and press the US government to impose trade sanctions o us, while they couldn't care less what our economic and social situation is.
I know how mesa works, but what I mean is, Isn that extremely counter productive? Hardware vendors like Nvidia and ATI release closed drivers that dont use MESA at all, if that approach works better for them, why would they need to depend on a third party project to implement newer GL features on the open source version?
That makes no sense, MESA doesn't have to support anything. Are not OpenGL extensions designed so the driver can provide higher versions of GL without the API (headers) having to care? (which is the case in Windows) If AMD releases a driver, they can easily release opengl 4 through extensions..
I can't find any info, so which version of OpenGL is supported? Is GL4 supported? Also how's the performance compared to the closed driver? I see everyone cherishing AMD for this, but being the news about a high performance 3D card, i'd expect the usefulness of their drivers and the real effort of open sourcing is on the 3D side, not so much on the 2D side and there's practically no information about this.
It's hard to believe how this insane patent war between the top technology companies was simply created by Google by releasing Android. It's like seeing two completely different business models and corporate visions clash against each other, like international politics did in the cold war era. Alternatively, we could go back even further and call it "Google Allies vs the Axis of Evil".
Having used everything on the list and much more (such as wx, GTK, etc), as well as making my own toolkits for embedded devices and products, my personal experience tells me hands down that Qt is the best choice for anything GUI related. It's power, ease of use, tools, documentation and learning curve are unparalleled to this day and age. Any other toolkit or API I've use fails in one or more of such areas. Qt is the only toolkit that made me feel as if they could know in advance everything i'd ever need (so when i go to the docs it's there, right how as i imagined it should be), yet keeping the bloat down with great modularization. I have used it from C++ as well as from Python with great success.
I'd rather use alternatives such as Ogre3D or Irrlitch even if not technologically advanced. I think that's the best way to support Linux-based game development, the same way Blender3D has been doing with their animated short films. Otherwise I feel the community will gain nothing from this.
You know, what bugs the the most is that even though Unigine is closed sourced, It has never been used in any important industry title, despite being around for years.
This is great for application developers that put out new version faster than distros can keep up (Example, Qt-Creator, which i download always as binary from nokia site). The problem is when you want to try an app that is either of something larger (KDE, Gnome), or an actual desktop environment, dependencies make it impossible..
1) No manufacturing cost
2) No logistic cost
3) No retailer cost
4) No export taxes cost
5) Because of 1-4, lower costs means several potential new markets with devaluated currency (think Latin America)
6) Because of the lower final price, the product will undoubtly sell more, while costing the same to develop and advertise.
7) Because of the lower final price, second hand markets will not be missed much.
Why, if this sounds so good in theory, is not happening? Sony PSPGO online distribution games cost the same as a full retail game. This is ridiculous. One could argue that it is important for consumers to have the physical game, but if you offer the downloadable version at a reduced price (say, at $30), together with the retail boxed game (at $50).. would there be that many players that will prefer the retail boxed version? As soon as they know they can get it cheaper without even leaving their home they won't care. Why is iTunes so succesful otherwise?
So my guess is that retailers (who will lose billions from this move and still will have to sell the console) will do like they did with the PSPGo and refuse to sell the consoles that do online distribution.. It's scary to think they may be that powerful..
Yes, and they are very effective, but, regardless of the weakness of mind, they are even more effective in Argentina because the people is still very susceptible to attacks against freedom of press and freedom of speech by the recent dictatorships. The media constantly publishes every move against them as attacks to freedom of press, or freedom of speech. In other countries, like Venezuela for example, people has shown to be less susceptible to media brainwash, and even did public demonstrations against TV stations that favored the failed coup.
A few clarifications from another fellow Argentinian.
Our current government has that schizophrenic touch that Bush had. Their policy is the same that Bush had: Helping their corporate friends, pushing an agenda
This is common for every single government over the face of the planet Earth. If you want to be critic with a government, this is one of the most irrelevant topics to discuss.
It's one of the largest companies in South America, and it has huge worldwide influences.
This is true, but they exert most of their influence here, by controlling public opinion. They are so strong in the country that they ultimately decide who gets to be president, and who gets the boot treatment.
Just like him, she's a fucking cunt, with a lot of personal interests that she has no moral issues pushing all the time, and a lot of friends to help out.
Congratulations you have just described a politician. This is the kind of ignorant part of society that Clarin tries to take advantage of, by convincing the people that the government is dishonest and corrupt, while at the same time promoting other (friendly to them) politicans that are (completely proven to be) equally or even more dishonest and corrupt (Like Julio Cobos or Eduardo Duhalde).
Grupo Clarin has been "alerting" that the economy is going to crash and burn for years now, that we'd have to import meat and flours (Argentina is one of the largest producers of meat), that the country will enter default, etc. Nothing happened.
Grupo Clarin constantly alerts that crime is on the rise and the no one can live safely because anyone can be bloodily murdered at any time, all this while Argentina is one of the safest countries in South America.
Grupo Clarin alerts that corrupt deals are made within the government for a just few hundred thousand dollars. Come on, for you and me that's a lot of money (and of course, Clarin knows that) but for the amount a government moves it's nothing. Companies do "favors" between them (read, money laundry, bonuses, etc) for much, much higher amounts.
Grupo Clarin alerts that during the Kirchner government, both Cristina and Nestor (her husband) became even richer by a few millions.. and it's like.. dude, if you get to be _fucking_ _president_ you are doing more than ONE THING right in your life..
So just get over it, I'd like to see the anti-government arguments focus on REAL issues, like development, economy, employment, etc, not the ridiculous fabrications of the media everyone here is talking about. I'm really sick of so many non-issue discussions.
The worst thing here is that there are not many alternatives in here where it comes to Internet access. In Buenos Aires (Argentina's Capital City) and nearby cities (Metropolitan Area) there are several providers, such as iplan, fibertel, telefonica, telecom, telmex, telecentro, and others. In the rest of the country, the options are much more limited.
This is really another non-issue. Fibertel is one of the largest ISPs, but due to their natue (Cablemodem) their reach is limited to big cities. You may call yourself an Argentinian, but If you ever travelled inside the country, you'll realize that if you want "Cable TV" the only option is DirectTV, as Cablevision (the Cable provider over which Fibertel works) is only available on big cities. Only telephony provides cover the entire country via ADSL, so fibertel ALREADY is the ISP with the least coverage. So this political move is pretty much a huge favor to telephony companies by the government..
I'm argentinian too, (and I'm affected) and let me fill up fellow slashdotters a little more on this. Grupo Clarin is a _huge_ media monopoly and the second largest company in the country. They own pretty much everything, every of the most relevant newspaper, cable TV company, Air TV signal, radio, broadband, media producers, etc. Until recently they have also all the monopoly on broadcasting all soccer games (soccer is big here). They slowly acquired monopoly status thanks to laws passed during dictatorship times (which they favored).
Grupo Clarin's reach is so large that they control most of the public thinking, and many times helped coups or to overthrow presidents that didn't get along well with them. They used to be in a good relationship with the current government until a few years ago, when something mysterious happened and they became enemies (it's not certain what happened, but most likely that the government blocked them access to entering them into telephony, by favoring other companies, so they couldn't expand their monopoly). As a result, every single day the largest newspapers, TV channels, etc attack the government in any way they can, fabricating negative scenarios, taking government claims out of context, etc, reducing significantly the positive image of the president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.
The government, in exchange, started passing several anti-monopoly laws to break Grupo Clarin, revoking their licenses, taking their grants for soccer broadcasting away, as well as prosecuting them for the crimes they committed during dictatorship.
As a personal view, I feel my fellow argentinians are too blinded by the two-way hate, and too worried about taking sides, that don't realize this mutual destruction between the media monopoly and the current government (one of the most corrupt governments in our history) is probably very beneficial for the country, as it's like killing two birds with one stone..
For the lulz, about 10 years ago, I created an IRC bot that connected to #sex and #cybersex in dalnet, and pretended to be a young girl awaiting for cyber..
Then it would interconnect pairs of two who would talk to her and forward the message, but this didn't work for long because they'd soon figure out the opposite partner was of the same sex. So i added a functionality that would flip words, example penis vagina, boobs balls, and would intercept some messages (like if a peer requested a picture, or ASL request) and send a fake ASL or URL of a hot chick. After a few attempts, most of the pairs ended up having cyber anyway! Even though bizarre phrases happened (like "I want to insert my 8 inch vagina into your deep wet penis") most people amazingly didn't even find it strange, and even though it was probably left running all night and created more probably a hundred "encounters", no one even suspected a tiny little about what was going on, no one!
Slashdot Mirror
H1B is not taking your jobs, Outsourcing is.
Workers under H1B may be appealing to some degree because they are cheaper and more over-workable, but they can be counted in the thousands, and they still help the economy by spending what they earn.
Outsourced jobs, on the other hand, are in the millions and much more appealing economically to large companies. There's several millions of outsourced jobs, not only in India, but also taken by Chinese, east Europeans, Russians and Latin Americans.
Also the tale that foreigners are less talented and that Americans should be hired instead is no longer relevant, the same way that china raised it's production standards the rest of the world is doing the same and each year there's more and more companies with excellent track records ready for outsorcing jobs from US and Euro companies.
This is the real effect of globalization and opening trade. Rich countries thought they could own poorer countries by forcing them to compete equally and purchase their goods while providing cheap labor. This had the expected result of destroying most of the local industry in such countries and forcing them to rely on imports.
However, no one expected the software industry to become so relevant worldwide. Cheap labor suddenly became cheap outsourcing, and there is no way first world workers can match the cheap costs of the third world, so this trend will continue and get worse.
It's not about talent, it's about commitment. Foreigners have to work hard to obtain a green card in the long run (something you are born with). Workers in H1B have a higher degree of commitment and will not (or cannot) switch jobs that easily if overworked or underpaid, so they are naturally very appealing to companies (who pay for the h1b and green card).
Downloading a torrent client is not much more difficult than downloading a small app or browser extension that sets up alternate DNS lookups.
"Typical Users" can learn..
we all know researchers don't take business decisions
That argument sounds meaningful, until you start looking at the actual patents involved. Far far most of software patents are obvious solutions to problems, too broad, unrelated, stuff related to an obvious (only way) to implement a specification, or simply rehashing prior art.
"research" sounds like wise people locked in a room where money is pumped and cool new revolutionary ideas are produced, but in reality it's just people realizing they did something just a *very sightly little bit different* than what it actually exists and getting a patent on it, which in exchange grants them way more protection and benefits than deserved.
The system is simply not designed for software patents to fit in. They are very easy to produce and even if some software patents *could* be considered as valid, reality is that far most should not and there is just not enough resources in this world to judge them all (or evena measure of how much protection must be granted in relation to how useful/revolutionary the idea is). So, in spite of a greater good, and considering the damage they are causing, we should get rid of them.
http://www.effectgames.com/demos/canvascycle/
Music Genres, Descriptive or Restrictive?
Movie Genres, Descriptive or Restritive?
We all know that human beings try to fit everything into different categories as a way of discerning and understanding. This process can be positive for many things such as science, but negative in other aspects such as social (leading to racism or discrimnation). Artistic genres exist so people will watch, play or listen to something they understand, something they are most comfortable or familiarized with, or simply, that it has elements that they know they like.
It's the same as with most youngs today, they will rather listen to Justin Bieber than Led Zeppelin, it's not so much about "quality" as an objective measure, but what they are familiar and comfortable with.
The rise of casual games, I believe has more to do with games being more available in general (most people will definitely not pay $50 to play a game genre they never played). The same phenomena can be observed with music, movies and tv series thanks to piracy, which allows viewers to check out and explore new content with little effort (not waiting for a specific broadcast time, or paying for a dvd/br release), while still being able to follow trends and socialize about it.
In short, make content more accesible, and people will be more prone to leave their comfort zone..
Mod parent up, it's going straight over the Lybian coast. This confirms the point in the article about why this kind of orbits are useful. It seems that it can obtain a complete picture of the lybian coastline every a few couple of hours, something very difficult to achieve with current satellites. What is most disturbing is that uprisings in Lybia were just begining when X37-B was launched, and it wasn't clear that a civil war broke up yet, so did the military change plans for the mission, or was all this attack on Lybia planned beforehand?
I don't understand why they focus so much on developers porting XBLA games, when they should be caring about iPhone or Android developers porting their games and applications to WP7. I can understand that they will not run Java on their system to avoid problems with oracle, but nothing avoids them from offering C++ / ObjC, which are both available on Apple and Google platforms. This allows a much larger amount of developers (and middlewares such as Unity) to offer the same on WP7 as everywhere else. .NET , I think developers will just keep writing their code in wathever is supported by the market leaders (Java, ObjC and C++), as they will not ditch their entire codebases to please Microsoft.
By forcing everyone to use
I thinks it's pretty simple if you think about it. Consumers all around the world don't see Microsoft as a true innovator in the technology business. What does this mean? It means that people does not see Microsoft products as "must-have" because of innovation, features or overall coolness.
Microsoft products become "must-have" only when they become the only platform available to run something the consumer wants.
Windows (Windows applications), Office (Office documments) and X-Box (X-Box games) are the main successful Microsoft products and all three follow this lock-in scenario.
Any other products, platforms or services they created (that don't depend on external content or software) were soon taken over by superior alternatives.
I think the problem is not so much about the CPU being the middle man, but the CPU having to issue every draw/state change call. Instancing is one of the many examples about why the current model is wrong.
A for() loop for drawing an object 5000 times is slow because there is a lot of cpu-gpu communication. Instancing fixes this but makes it less flexible (you cant change which arrays are drawn or most of the state between objects).
Discaimer: I am a pro game developer, wrote a few engines for commercial games, etc. I know what this guy means and ill try to explain it a bit better. The biggest problem with the DX model (which was inherited from GL) is the high dependency on the CPU to instruct it what to do.
State changes and draw commands are all sent from the CPU, buffered and then processed in the GPU. While this speeds up rendering considerably (the GPU is always a frame ore two behind the CPU) it makes it limiting, to get feedback from the GPU about the rendering state, and since the all the DX/GL commands are buffered, retrieving state or data means flushing/sync.
From modern algorithms related to occlusion estimation, or global illumination to overall reduction of state changes, it would benefit greatly if, for most tasks, the GPU could act by itself by running an user-made kernel that instructs it what to do (commands and state changes) instead of relying on DX, but for some reason this is not the direction GPUs are heading to, and it really doesnt make sense. Maybe Microsoft has something to do with it, but since Directx9 became the standard for game development, the API only became easier to program in versions 10 and 11, but didn't have major changes.
Copyright enforcement (to the level that US corporations are happy with) is costly in many ways. Intelligence is needed for detecting infringements, police is needed for raiding suspects and forensics, and finally judges and prosecutors are needed for each infringement case.
In developing world nations like mine (Argentina), stronger copyright laws are a total waste of taxpayers money that will only benefits foreign media producers.
Added to that, we are already short on policemen and judges (which are already underpaid) , so even if laws such as these were to pass, there would simply not be enough human resources to enforce them. Plain and simple.
The reason why watch lists such as these exist is because media lobbysts realize that countries like mine are no way as poor as, say, Nigeria, so they want a share of the pie, and press the US government to impose trade sanctions o us, while they couldn't care less what our economic and social situation is.
I know how mesa works, but what I mean is, Isn that extremely counter productive? Hardware vendors like Nvidia and ATI release closed drivers that dont use MESA at all, if that approach works better for them, why would they need to depend on a third party project to implement newer GL features on the open source version?
That makes no sense, MESA doesn't have to support anything. Are not OpenGL extensions designed so the driver can provide higher versions of GL without the API (headers) having to care? (which is the case in Windows) If AMD releases a driver, they can easily release opengl 4 through extensions..
I can't find any info, so which version of OpenGL is supported? Is GL4 supported? Also how's the performance compared to the closed driver? I see everyone cherishing AMD for this, but being the news about a high performance 3D card, i'd expect the usefulness of their drivers and the real effort of open sourcing is on the 3D side, not so much on the 2D side and there's practically no information about this.
It's hard to believe how this insane patent war between the top technology companies was simply created by Google by releasing Android. It's like seeing two completely different business models and corporate visions clash against each other, like international politics did in the cold war era. Alternatively, we could go back even further and call it "Google Allies vs the Axis of Evil".
Having used everything on the list and much more (such as wx, GTK, etc), as well as making my own toolkits for embedded devices and products, my personal experience tells me hands down that Qt is the best choice for anything GUI related. It's power, ease of use, tools, documentation and learning curve are unparalleled to this day and age. Any other toolkit or API I've use fails in one or more of such areas.
Qt is the only toolkit that made me feel as if they could know in advance everything i'd ever need (so when i go to the docs it's there, right how as i imagined it should be), yet keeping the bloat down with great modularization. I have used it from C++ as well as from Python with great success.
I'd rather use alternatives such as Ogre3D or Irrlitch even if not technologically advanced. I think that's the best way to support Linux-based game development, the same way Blender3D has been doing with their animated short films. Otherwise I feel the community will gain nothing from this. You know, what bugs the the most is that even though Unigine is closed sourced, It has never been used in any important industry title, despite being around for years.
This is great for application developers that put out new version faster than distros can keep up (Example, Qt-Creator, which i download always as binary from nokia site). The problem is when you want to try an app that is either of something larger (KDE, Gnome), or an actual desktop environment, dependencies make it impossible..
Online distribution sounds great in theory!
1) No manufacturing cost
2) No logistic cost
3) No retailer cost
4) No export taxes cost
5) Because of 1-4, lower costs means several potential new markets with devaluated currency (think Latin America)
6) Because of the lower final price, the product will undoubtly sell more, while costing the same to develop and advertise.
7) Because of the lower final price, second hand markets will not be missed much.
Why, if this sounds so good in theory, is not happening? Sony PSPGO online distribution games cost the same as a full retail game. This is ridiculous. One could argue that it is important for consumers to have the physical game, but if you offer the downloadable version at a reduced price (say, at $30), together with the retail boxed game (at $50).. would there be that many players that will prefer the retail boxed version? As soon as they know they can get it cheaper without even leaving their home they won't care. Why is iTunes so succesful otherwise?
So my guess is that retailers (who will lose billions from this move and still will have to sell the console) will do like they did with the PSPGo and refuse to sell the consoles that do online distribution.. It's scary to think they may be that powerful..
Yes, and they are very effective, but, regardless of the weakness of mind, they are even more effective in Argentina because the people is still very susceptible to attacks against freedom of press and freedom of speech by the recent dictatorships. The media constantly publishes every move against them as attacks to freedom of press, or freedom of speech. In other countries, like Venezuela for example, people has shown to be less susceptible to media brainwash, and even did public demonstrations against TV stations that favored the failed coup.
Our current government has that schizophrenic touch that Bush had. Their policy is the same that Bush had: Helping their corporate friends, pushing an agenda
This is common for every single government over the face of the planet Earth. If you want to be critic with a government, this is one of the most irrelevant topics to discuss.
It's one of the largest companies in South America, and it has huge worldwide influences.
This is true, but they exert most of their influence here, by controlling public opinion. They are so strong in the country that they ultimately decide who gets to be president, and who gets the boot treatment.
Just like him, she's a fucking cunt, with a lot of personal interests that she has no moral issues pushing all the time, and a lot of friends to help out.
Congratulations you have just described a politician. This is the kind of ignorant part of society that Clarin tries to take advantage of, by convincing the people that the government is dishonest and corrupt, while at the same time promoting other (friendly to them) politicans that are (completely proven to be) equally or even more dishonest and corrupt (Like Julio Cobos or Eduardo Duhalde).
Grupo Clarin has been "alerting" that the economy is going to crash and burn for years now, that we'd have to import meat and flours (Argentina is one of the largest producers of meat), that the country will enter default, etc. Nothing happened.
Grupo Clarin constantly alerts that crime is on the rise and the no one can live safely because anyone can be bloodily murdered at any time, all this while Argentina is one of the safest countries in South America.
Grupo Clarin alerts that corrupt deals are made within the government for a just few hundred thousand dollars. Come on, for you and me that's a lot of money (and of course, Clarin knows that) but for the amount a government moves it's nothing. Companies do "favors" between them (read, money laundry, bonuses, etc) for much, much higher amounts.
Grupo Clarin alerts that during the Kirchner government, both Cristina and Nestor (her husband) became even richer by a few millions.. and it's like.. dude, if you get to be _fucking_ _president_ you are doing more than ONE THING right in your life..
So just get over it, I'd like to see the anti-government arguments focus on REAL issues, like development, economy, employment, etc, not the ridiculous fabrications of the media everyone here is talking about. I'm really sick of so many non-issue discussions.
The worst thing here is that there are not many alternatives in here where it comes to Internet access. In Buenos Aires (Argentina's Capital City) and nearby cities (Metropolitan Area) there are several providers, such as iplan, fibertel, telefonica, telecom, telmex, telecentro, and others. In the rest of the country, the options are much more limited.
This is really another non-issue. Fibertel is one of the largest ISPs, but due to their natue (Cablemodem) their reach is limited to big cities. You may call yourself an Argentinian, but If you ever travelled inside the country, you'll realize that if you want "Cable TV" the only option is DirectTV, as Cablevision (the Cable provider over which Fibertel works) is only available on big cities. Only telephony provides cover the entire country via ADSL, so fibertel ALREADY is the ISP with the least coverage. So this political move is pretty much a huge favor to telephony companies by the government..
Sorry, you've been brainwashed.
I'm argentinian too, (and I'm affected) and let me fill up fellow slashdotters a little more on this. Grupo Clarin is a _huge_ media monopoly and the second largest company in the country. They own pretty much everything, every of the most relevant newspaper, cable TV company, Air TV signal, radio, broadband, media producers, etc. Until recently they have also all the monopoly on broadcasting all soccer games (soccer is big here). They slowly acquired monopoly status thanks to laws passed during dictatorship times (which they favored).
Grupo Clarin's reach is so large that they control most of the public thinking, and many times helped coups or to overthrow presidents that didn't get along well with them. They used to be in a good relationship with the current government until a few years ago, when something mysterious happened and they became enemies (it's not certain what happened, but most likely that the government blocked them access to entering them into telephony, by favoring other companies, so they couldn't expand their monopoly). As a result, every single day the largest newspapers, TV channels, etc attack the government in any way they can, fabricating negative scenarios, taking government claims out of context, etc, reducing significantly the positive image of the president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.
The government, in exchange, started passing several anti-monopoly laws to break Grupo Clarin, revoking their licenses, taking their grants for soccer broadcasting away, as well as prosecuting them for the crimes they committed during dictatorship.
As a personal view, I feel my fellow argentinians are too blinded by the two-way hate, and too worried about taking sides, that don't realize this mutual destruction between the media monopoly and the current government (one of the most corrupt governments in our history) is probably very beneficial for the country, as it's like killing two birds with one stone..
For the lulz, about 10 years ago, I created an IRC bot that connected to #sex and #cybersex in dalnet, and pretended to be a young girl awaiting for cyber..
Then it would interconnect pairs of two who would talk to her and forward the message, but this didn't work for long because they'd soon figure out the opposite partner was of the same sex. So i added a functionality that would flip words, example penis vagina, boobs balls, and would intercept some messages (like if a peer requested a picture, or ASL request) and send a fake ASL or URL of a hot chick. After a few attempts, most of the pairs ended up having cyber anyway!
Even though bizarre phrases happened (like "I want to insert my 8 inch vagina into your deep wet penis") most people amazingly didn't even find it strange, and even though it was probably left running all night and created more probably a hundred "encounters", no one even suspected a tiny little about what was going on, no one!