OK. If you need activeX, you can run IE. There's no need that everybody switches to IE. The enterprise that relies on IE+ActiveX does already have many security issues to care about, and many of the improvements of Firefox over IE would be redundant.
For me, Firefox is free (as in "freedom") and IE is non-free (as in "proprietary"). It's more secure by default. It's more streamlined, easy to configure. Runs in Linux.
(Of course, it has lots of extensions that I need for development, but I'm trying to think as a user) Those are many of the reasons I like Firefox.
Maybe if I relied on ActiveX, I would like that FF could handle ActiveX!
But wait! Firefox + ActiveX is non-free. It's non-secure. It would be another feature to configure (security zones?). It is Windows-only.
I already have a product with those characteristics, and it's called IE!!
So, there's no need for Firefox + ActiveX. Maybe as an abscure extension that the mozilla developers don't have to support, but I don't want ActiveX in my browser!!
For as bad as you say it is, most of you would give a testicle to have a Linux version of the product, because there really aint nothin better.
I was agreeing with you, but you lost me here. Dreamweaver is cool. Most people would love a free alternative to dreaweaver.
The amount of people who want a Linux version of Adobe software is small, I believe. If I am willing to pay someone several hundred bucks to run his proprietary software, I might as well just use Windows XP.
There's little improvement on running a Linux based system, over windows on the desktop, _if_you_ don't_ have a problem with closed/proprietary software in the first place.
Although this is not the case, such a restriction wouldn't be that strange.
The whole idea behind the GPL is freedom, but that's too wide a term. The GPL is not about freedom for the distributor, it's about freedom for the user, at the expense of the distributors.
Even if you weren't allowed to distribute non-GPLd docs with GPLd fonts, it would still be fair. The idea is to share with the people that share. If you don't want to share, there's a lot ther fonts you can use.
Nowhere did I say that your method is wrong. I was just pointing out that a disk to disk backup can give you a lot of confidence that doesn't reflect the truth.
Believe me, in my country, even buying a second HD is quite difficult. I backup to CD, when I can.
A good backup disk, though, would be to have that second disk in an usb casing that is just connected for backups. The cost is not that high, and the security is much higher. Of course, that is when the data in your computer is more expensive than the 200 dollars for the HD / usb case combination.
Plus, if I were you, I wouldn't use freeware. It's hard enough to trust big corps with your data, it's harder to trust some guy's.EXE. Free software is the way to go!! You can use tar.exe + bzip2.exe
tar cv "dir1" "dir2" "dirN" | bzip2 > h:\backup.tar.bz2
It has happened to me _twice_ before, a power failure destroying everything in the computer. Your power source could die and take with it both your work disk, and your backup disk. Q.E.P.D. (spanish for "R.I.P.").
Of course. But there are a lot of people that use google as their gateway to the internet. Googling for videos might one day get to be easier than buying cable, and using the tv remote + cable box remote.
Of course, but we earthians tend to think of our life as "the universe", and a small team of people,a relatively small set of simple weapons, + some vehicles, could wipe out the entire human civilization at some point, or at least our civilization as we know it. Plus, he/she would have the power to find the best spot in time to choose.
I you can't code, you can pay (contribute money, or even pay someone to contribute code a la "rentacoder"). You can beta test, and file bugzilla reports. You can make nice logos, or themes for the port, if you are really into the Gimp. Those are ways you can contribute to a port, without coding skillz
Of course, you report that you are vocal about OSS. That's very good, and _does_ help a lot. Of course, _I_ care much more about free software than OSS, and I spend much of my time explaining the difference and the relevance of freedom in the whole scheme of things.
RMS is a great programmer, and he spends most of his time talking, because talking _is_ good.
If this happened in the former USSR, that would be true, because there was no other way to get funded.
In the end, this could be good, because lack of government funding could even be an incentive to privately funded research. That way, some research could be guided by private interests, effectively taking away that "banning" power from the government.
In my country (Uruguay) something very loosely related, but illustrative, happened. The government used to spend lots of money on air TV and the press, effectively being one of the pillars of their funding. As a result, the media was very slanted towards the ruling party, and even failed to report news unfavorable to the presidents image. A couple years ago, the government stopped wasting money on senseless ads, and as a result, the press now is free, they report corruption issues in state organizations, they are very sharp in interviews, as they were never allowed to, at least in big media.
Well, the "seal" problem could be solved by multi-layer seams with removable layers.
The contamination problem wouldn't be solved completely, but I believe it could do much to reduce the problem.
On the other hand, I see lots of places where this would be useful, and isn't used, like biological suits, radiation suits, and stuff. One thing is an idea, and another is a good implementation.
That's just because you don't just understand computers.
Computers are programmed by humans. Humans are creative. Computer can make up a substitute for being creative. They can have a lot of information connected in unusual or unthinkable ways. There are right now data mining algorithms that do that kind of stuff, and come up with somewhat impressive results. They find correlations where humans couldn't.
Of course, the intelligence is in the algorithms, because a computer is nothing on it's own, it's just an extension of human intelligence. That's how computer manage to outsmart humans, they have humans behind them.
A computer of course can't come up with anything. A mathematician + a computer could overaccomplish a mathmatician alone, though.
Many projects do have people who care about your problems, and more if you pay them. If you want something better, RedHat has _lots_ of people working in the specific projects that might need support, and when you pay for support, they fix bugs for you. Of course, if RedHat does go out of bussines, there's always Novell/SuSE, or even */Debian. You seem to believe that Microsoft will never cease to support you, but that's just a belief, in bussiness, that sort of thing does happen. The sensible option in _any_ case is to have an easy way out. There are not many ways out if Microsoft chooses not to support you. If you have a GNU/Linux shop, and RedHat fails, you have lots of real options to keep on going.
Plus, yes, you _do_ have the source code, so in the case of a major catastrophe where every other support possibility fails, you can always hire someone and fix that glitch that bothers you in Apache.
In the case of Microsoft, you are just in the hands of Ballmer. If next quarter he begins to believe that personalized support is a cost center and should be outsourced, your support might suffer a lot in quality. And although it's not that likely, it is a real possibility, and you should take it into account, because in the real world, thinks that are not likely, do happen.
There may be a 'clean room' to disengage the suits, but no matter how you adjust for the problem (save going underwater in an ultrasonic scrubber) that dust will move with you.
You could make a suit design which didn't need to share the same atmosphere between the inside/outside.
That could be accomplished by building a two-phase room with a divided wall in the middle. You could have something like a front "zipper" in the outfit, that could attach to the opening wall, and _then_ open itself. That would leave the outside of the suit in the "dirty" part of the room, and the inside, including the person inside, in the "clean" part of the room, not sharing air at all. Of course, that's not how spacesuits work right now, and it's not that easy from an engineering standpoint, but I don't see why I couldn't be done.
Ok, again. Opera, I used to like. Now I don't use windows anymore, and I choose not to use non-free software, for ethical rather than technical reasons. That doesn't mean I don't care about features. I even run some non-free software when I just need to, to get my work done.
What happens to me with Opera is that it was great, tabs were really great. Now Firefox is just smoother to me. I am a usability freak, too. It just happens that Firefox doesn't have usability issues that interfere with _my_ habits. I like, for example, its handling of dialogs, explanation of actions and defaults.
When you talk about innovation... well, what innovation are you talking about? lots of free software (not just OSS software) is way ahead of what is available in proprietary software. Of course, mainstream free software or OSS is just... mainstream. The most popular pieces of OSS are the replacements to what propriteary software makes. As a counter-example, you have cinepaint, developed from gaim, that implements lots of useful stuff for movie making. There, gaim started as a copy (I never learned effective photoshop, but I can use gaim) of photoshop, and it helped develop something that wasn't available to the general public.
Another big example of free software innovation, is archy, a different way to do things, that was originally proposed in a book by Jef Raskin, and is developed in the open, without the support of any big software company, at least until now. I believe it doesn't get more innovative than this (http://www.raskincenter.org/index2.html#whatisarc hy).
I believe you are not quoting right. The OP stated that there is some amount of error inherent to software development, and that MS developers were supposed to be assumed to have the same quality as mozilla developers.
What I meant is that mozilla developers produce code of a much more measurable (for the general public) quality, and that fact for itself is important.
What I exactly meant is that it does matter what you are using, because you can make an more informed decision about whether you use or not mozilla, and it has a record way better than IE, by any sensible measure.
What you say about a company being for profit, and the fact that they should fix issues faster goeas against the fact that vulnerability fixes are available faster for software developed by free charge software.
MS programmers come from who-knows-where, and noone can see their code to see if it's good. MS feature list comes from marketing dept. Its release deadlines, from marketing dept + the reality. If reality-based delays don't meet marketing expectations, we don't know what they do.
Mozilla developers can be put to test, because we can read their code, there is even people who do read their code. If you got any conclusions on the mozilla developers skill, you couldn't extrapolate them to MS developers, because you can't see their code. Mozilla feature list comes from user feedback + whatever the maintainers feel is sensible to add. Their release schedule are firmly based on reality, coders and maintainers. They release when it's ready, basically. The way they use to meet a self-imposed deadline is basically to keep new features out.
They are very different pieces of software, and we could measure the quaility of mozilla software, but we cannot do the same with IE, other than on the surface. We could measure the quaility of the mozilla development process, and we can't do the same with IE.
What I believe is that it can be argued if mozilla is good software or not, and to an extent, setting some framework, it can be proved. The same can't be done about MS software.
So, what I mean is that there can be other reasons than just personal like or dislike to talk about quality between MS software. Just because microsoft software quality is unknow it doesn't mean that it is equal to mozilla software quality. At least mozilla software quality is measurable, that alone _does_ make it better.
IE bugs are a real problem because you can't hide from it. If mozilla has some critic bug, you can always disable mozilla and use konqueror until mozilla releases a fix. That would be a day or two without mozilla. In an IE-scenario, you would not be able to disable IE, plus there's no reasonable amount of time after which you can expect a bug will be fixed. Noone is talking about bug-free software. Bug-free software is just not worth it, it would take too muuch time and money to be useful.
The thing with IE is that most people can't trust Microsoft to fix IE issues fast enough.
Security issues, although all of them can be critical, cannot be measured just as "amount of critical issues made public". If you factor in at least the severity of the issue * time for a patch, the numbers are very different between mozilla* and IE.
Maybe they are promising a more secure IE in the future, but there's just no need for it. It's difficult to regain trust in something that has failed your objectives so miserabily in the past.
Two hours doing something you didn't want to do is a lot of time. Two hours when you have a deadline is a lot of money. Two hours in the workplace would not be acceptable.
Plus, you would need to know your system has been compromised in the first place, and then reinstall the same unsecure software.
With mozilla, you could wait 8 more hours, and install a patched version of your software.
Dumbass. Gnomemeeting already worked. Gaim-vv already worked. The videoconferencing was already available. The issue here was _interoperability_ with MSN using friends, where Microsoft played as an obstacle, now removed.
The MLN had nothing to do with the communist party, either in Uruguay or in Russia. They both did read Marx, of course, but they are not affiliated in any way. there was a time where they hated each other.
They were the most voted list in the last election. Their most popular leader is a minister right now, and they rule the lower chamber of the "congress". They are right now the most popular political force, into the leading party.
I agree with you that USSR interventionism was disgusting. But it's not just communist interventionism is disgusting, any kind of interventionism is.
196x: MLN-Tupamaros rises against totalitarian right wing government. Some armed fight. 1970: Uruguay is a democracy. A totalitarian right wing government, but a democracy. 1971: The elections are rigged against center-right presidential candidate Ferreira. 1973: MLN-Tupamaros movement jailed (all of them). 1973: Right wing Bordaberry gives government to insurgent military. (Yes, _after_ the "communist menace" is completely defeated) The communist party did exist at the time, but in size was almost non existant. They primarily took control of the government because they saw that 300.000 people assisted a Frente Amplio public act, where 1.5M people votes. Frente Amplio was and is a center-left coalition that won the government last election with 50.5% of the votes.
Here, the SOA helps that military government in terror tactics that extends into the eighties.
result: 12 years of lost time for our country, hundreds of "desaparecidos" (people jailed by the police/military but missing/assasinated). Billions of external debt. Social disaster.
The SOA helped a government with no enemy to fight its own people, at least in my country. They were only one more instrument of oppression and hostile intervention.
The US didn't want left-wing governments in the area, and they succeded, for 30 years. Now that they left the region alone, the region makes their own decisions, and for a change is becoming independent of international financing institutions.
Uruguay was a democracy, and suffered 11-12 years of SOA-aided military oppresion from 1973 to 1985. Argentina, Chile, and many others had similar regimes.
Unless by democracy you mean ultra-rightist military government, there was little democracy troughout Latin America.
Most CIA helped military governments replaces democracies, and left destroyed countries as their outcome. In the social, and the economical sense too.
I don't know how you inform yourself of oprresion. Although there are awful things happening in Cuba, it was worse in other countries with the help of the CIA in Latin America. For example, in Argentina, political "enemies" were put to sleep and dumped in the ocean. Cuba does execute people, but it's not worse than what the US does right now trhoughout the world. The US did have the power to stop communism, but the things our peoples feared of communism did happen and do happen under the US rule ( state terrorism, orwellian states et al).
Slashdot Mirror
OK.
If you need activeX, you can run IE.
There's no need that everybody switches to IE.
The enterprise that relies on IE+ActiveX does already have many security issues to care about, and many of the improvements of Firefox over IE would be redundant.
For me, Firefox is free (as in "freedom") and IE is non-free (as in "proprietary"). It's more secure by default. It's more streamlined, easy to configure. Runs in Linux.
(Of course, it has lots of extensions that I need for development, but I'm trying to think as a user)
Those are many of the reasons I like Firefox.
Maybe if I relied on ActiveX, I would like that FF could handle ActiveX!
But wait!
Firefox + ActiveX is non-free. It's non-secure.
It would be another feature to configure (security zones?). It is Windows-only.
I already have a product with those characteristics, and it's called IE!!
So, there's no need for Firefox + ActiveX.
Maybe as an abscure extension that the mozilla developers don't have to support, but I don't want ActiveX in my browser!!
For as bad as you say it is, most of you would give a testicle to have a Linux version of the product, because there really aint nothin better.
I was agreeing with you, but you lost me here.
Dreamweaver is cool.
Most people would love a free alternative to dreaweaver.
The amount of people who want a Linux version of Adobe software is small, I believe.
If I am willing to pay someone several hundred bucks to run his proprietary software, I might as well just use Windows XP.
There's little improvement on running a Linux based system, over windows on the desktop, _if_you_ don't_ have a problem with closed/proprietary software in the first place.
Although this is not the case, such a restriction wouldn't be that strange.
The whole idea behind the GPL is freedom, but that's too wide a term. The GPL is not about freedom for the distributor, it's about freedom for the user, at the expense of the distributors.
Even if you weren't allowed to distribute non-GPLd docs with GPLd fonts, it would still be fair. The idea is to share with the people that share. If you don't want to share, there's a lot ther fonts you can use.
Nowhere did I say that your method is wrong. I was just pointing out that a disk to disk backup can give you a lot of confidence that doesn't reflect the truth.
.EXE. Free software is the way to go!! You can use tar.exe + bzip2.exe
Believe me, in my country, even buying a second HD is quite difficult. I backup to CD, when I can.
A good backup disk, though, would be to have that second disk in an usb casing that is just connected for backups. The cost is not that high, and the security is much higher. Of course, that is when the data in your computer is more expensive than the 200 dollars for the HD / usb case combination.
Plus, if I were you, I wouldn't use freeware. It's hard enough to trust big corps with your data, it's harder to trust some guy's
tar cv "dir1" "dir2" "dirN" | bzip2 > h:\backup.tar.bz2
That's how _I_ make my backups, at least.
It has happened to me _twice_ before, a power failure destroying everything in the computer.
Your power source could die and take with it both your work disk, and your backup disk. Q.E.P.D. (spanish for "R.I.P.").
It's fall here, and it rains.
Of course.
But there are a lot of people that use google as their gateway to the internet.
Googling for videos might one day get to be easier than buying cable, and using the tv remote + cable box remote.
Of course, but we earthians tend to think of our life as "the universe", and a small team of people,a relatively small set of simple weapons, + some vehicles, could wipe out the entire human civilization at some point, or at least our civilization as we know it.
Plus, he/she would have the power to find the best spot in time to choose.
I you can't code, you can pay (contribute money, or even pay someone to contribute code a la "rentacoder").
You can beta test, and file bugzilla reports.
You can make nice logos, or themes for the port, if you are really into the Gimp.
Those are ways you can contribute to a port, without coding skillz
Of course, you report that you are vocal about OSS. That's very good, and _does_ help a lot. Of course, _I_ care much more about free software than OSS, and I spend much of my time explaining the difference and the relevance of freedom in the whole scheme of things.
RMS is a great programmer, and he spends most of his time talking, because talking _is_ good.
It's not the same.
If this happened in the former USSR, that would be true, because there was no other way to get funded.
In the end, this could be good, because lack of government funding could even be an incentive to privately funded research. That way, some research could be guided by private interests, effectively taking away that "banning" power from the government.
In my country (Uruguay) something very loosely related, but illustrative, happened. The government used to spend lots of money on air TV and the press, effectively being one of the pillars of their funding.
As a result, the media was very slanted towards the ruling party, and even failed to report news unfavorable to the presidents image.
A couple years ago, the government stopped wasting money on senseless ads, and as a result, the press now is free, they report corruption issues in state organizations, they are very sharp in interviews, as they were never allowed to, at least in big media.
Well, the "seal" problem could be solved by multi-layer seams with removable layers.
The contamination problem wouldn't be solved completely, but I believe it could do much to reduce the problem.
On the other hand, I see lots of places where this would be useful, and isn't used, like biological suits, radiation suits, and stuff. One thing is an idea, and another is a good implementation.
That's just because you don't just understand computers.
Computers are programmed by humans.
Humans are creative.
Computer can make up a substitute for being creative. They can have a lot of information connected in unusual or unthinkable ways. There are right now data mining algorithms that do that kind of stuff, and come up with somewhat impressive results.
They find correlations where humans couldn't.
Of course, the intelligence is in the algorithms, because a computer is nothing on it's own, it's just an extension of human intelligence. That's how computer manage to outsmart humans, they have humans behind them.
A computer of course can't come up with anything.
A mathematician + a computer could overaccomplish a mathmatician alone, though.
Many projects do have people who care about your problems, and more if you pay them.
If you want something better, RedHat has _lots_ of people working in the specific projects that might need support, and when you pay for support, they fix bugs for you.
Of course, if RedHat does go out of bussines, there's always Novell/SuSE, or even */Debian.
You seem to believe that Microsoft will never cease to support you, but that's just a belief, in bussiness, that sort of thing does happen.
The sensible option in _any_ case is to have an easy way out. There are not many ways out if Microsoft chooses not to support you. If you have a GNU/Linux shop, and RedHat fails, you have lots of real options to keep on going.
Plus, yes, you _do_ have the source code, so in the case of a major catastrophe where every other support possibility fails, you can always hire someone and fix that glitch that bothers you in Apache.
In the case of Microsoft, you are just in the hands of Ballmer. If next quarter he begins to believe that personalized support is a cost center and should be outsourced, your support might suffer a lot in quality. And although it's not that likely, it is a real possibility, and you should take it into account, because in the real world, thinks that are not likely, do happen.
There may be a 'clean room' to disengage the suits, but no matter how you adjust for the problem (save going underwater in an ultrasonic scrubber) that dust will move with you.
You could make a suit design which didn't need to share the same atmosphere between the inside/outside.
That could be accomplished by building a two-phase room with a divided wall in the middle. You could have something like a front "zipper" in the outfit, that could attach to the opening wall, and _then_ open itself. That would leave the outside of the suit in the "dirty" part of the room, and the inside, including the person inside, in the "clean" part of the room, not sharing air at all.
Of course, that's not how spacesuits work right now, and it's not that easy from an engineering standpoint, but I don't see why I couldn't be done.
Ok, again.
c hy).
Opera, I used to like.
Now I don't use windows anymore, and I choose not to use non-free software, for ethical rather than technical reasons. That doesn't mean I don't care about features. I even run some non-free software when I just need to, to get my work done.
What happens to me with Opera is that it was great, tabs were really great. Now Firefox is just smoother to me. I am a usability freak, too. It just happens that Firefox doesn't have usability issues that interfere with _my_ habits. I like, for example, its handling of dialogs, explanation of actions and defaults.
When you talk about innovation... well, what innovation are you talking about? lots of free software (not just OSS software) is way ahead of what is available in proprietary software.
Of course, mainstream free software or OSS is just... mainstream. The most popular pieces of OSS are the replacements to what propriteary software makes.
As a counter-example, you have cinepaint, developed from gaim, that implements lots of useful stuff for movie making. There, gaim started as a copy (I never learned effective photoshop, but I can use gaim) of photoshop, and it helped develop something that wasn't available to the general public.
Another big example of free software innovation, is archy, a different way to do things, that was originally proposed in a book by Jef Raskin, and is developed in the open, without the support of any big software company, at least until now. I believe it doesn't get more innovative than this (http://www.raskincenter.org/index2.html#whatisar
Opera suxx : )
I believe you are not quoting right.
The OP stated that there is some amount of error inherent to software development, and that MS developers were supposed to be assumed to have the same quality as mozilla developers.
What I meant is that mozilla developers produce code of a much more measurable (for the general public) quality, and that fact for itself is important.
What I exactly meant is that it does matter what you are using, because you can make an more informed decision about whether you use or not mozilla, and it has a record way better than IE, by any sensible measure.
What you say about a company being for profit, and the fact that they should fix issues faster goeas against the fact that vulnerability fixes are available faster for software developed by free charge software.
You are right.
I hadn't seen that 1.2.x release.
I stand corrected.
MS programmers come from who-knows-where, and noone can see their code to see if it's good.
MS feature list comes from marketing dept. Its release deadlines, from marketing dept + the reality. If reality-based delays don't meet marketing expectations, we don't know what they do.
Mozilla developers can be put to test, because we can read their code, there is even people who do read their code. If you got any conclusions on the mozilla developers skill, you couldn't extrapolate them to MS developers, because you can't see their code.
Mozilla feature list comes from user feedback + whatever the maintainers feel is sensible to add.
Their release schedule are firmly based on reality, coders and maintainers. They release when it's ready, basically. The way they use to meet a self-imposed deadline is basically to keep new features out.
They are very different pieces of software, and we could measure the quaility of mozilla software, but we cannot do the same with IE, other than on the surface. We could measure the quaility of the mozilla development process, and we can't do the same with IE.
What I believe is that it can be argued if mozilla is good software or not, and to an extent, setting some framework, it can be proved. The same can't be done about MS software.
So, what I mean is that there can be other reasons than just personal like or dislike to talk about quality between MS software. Just because microsoft software quality is unknow it doesn't mean that it is equal to mozilla software quality. At least mozilla software quality is measurable, that alone _does_ make it better.
IE bugs are a real problem because you can't hide from it.
If mozilla has some critic bug, you can always disable mozilla and use konqueror until mozilla releases a fix. That would be a day or two without mozilla.
In an IE-scenario, you would not be able to disable IE, plus there's no reasonable amount of time after which you can expect a bug will be fixed.
Noone is talking about bug-free software. Bug-free software is just not worth it, it would take too muuch time and money to be useful.
The thing with IE is that most people can't trust Microsoft to fix IE issues fast enough.
Security issues, although all of them can be critical, cannot be measured just as "amount of critical issues made public". If you factor in at least the severity of the issue * time for a patch, the numbers are very different between mozilla* and IE.
Maybe they are promising a more secure IE in the future, but there's just no need for it. It's difficult to regain trust in something that has failed your objectives so miserabily in the past.
Two hours doing something you didn't want to do is a lot of time.
Two hours when you have a deadline is a lot of money.
Two hours in the workplace would not be acceptable.
Plus, you would need to know your system has been compromised in the first place, and then reinstall the same unsecure software.
With mozilla, you could wait 8 more hours, and install a patched version of your software.
Dumbass.
Gnomemeeting already worked.
Gaim-vv already worked.
The videoconferencing was already available.
The issue here was _interoperability_ with MSN using friends, where Microsoft played as an obstacle, now removed.
The MLN had nothing to do with the communist party, either in Uruguay or in Russia. They both did read Marx, of course, but they are not affiliated in any way. there was a time where they hated each other.
They were the most voted list in the last election.
Their most popular leader is a minister right now, and they rule the lower chamber of the "congress".
They are right now the most popular political force, into the leading party.
I agree with you that USSR interventionism was disgusting. But it's not just communist interventionism is disgusting, any kind of interventionism is.
196x: MLN-Tupamaros rises against totalitarian right wing government. Some armed fight.
1970: Uruguay is a democracy. A totalitarian right wing government, but a democracy.
1971: The elections are rigged against center-right presidential candidate Ferreira. 1973: MLN-Tupamaros movement jailed (all of them).
1973: Right wing Bordaberry gives government to insurgent military. (Yes, _after_ the "communist menace" is completely defeated)
The communist party did exist at the time, but in size was almost non existant.
They primarily took control of the government because they saw that 300.000 people assisted a Frente Amplio public act, where 1.5M people votes.
Frente Amplio was and is a center-left coalition that won the government last election with 50.5% of the votes.
Here, the SOA helps that military government in terror tactics that extends into the eighties.
result: 12 years of lost time for our country, hundreds of "desaparecidos" (people jailed by the police/military but missing/assasinated). Billions of external debt. Social disaster.
The SOA helped a government with no enemy to fight its own people, at least in my country. They were only one more instrument of oppression and hostile intervention.
The US didn't want left-wing governments in the area, and they succeded, for 30 years. Now that they left the region alone, the region makes their own decisions, and for a change is becoming independent of international financing institutions.
Uruguay was a democracy, and suffered 11-12 years of SOA-aided military oppresion from 1973 to 1985. Argentina, Chile, and many others had similar regimes.
Unless by democracy you mean ultra-rightist military government, there was little democracy troughout Latin America.
Most CIA helped military governments replaces democracies, and left destroyed countries as their outcome. In the social, and the economical sense too.
I don't know how you inform yourself of oprresion. Although there are awful things happening in Cuba, it was worse in other countries with the help of the CIA in Latin America. For example, in Argentina, political "enemies" were put to sleep and dumped in the ocean. Cuba does execute people, but it's not worse than what the US does right now trhoughout the world. The US did have the power to stop communism, but the things our peoples feared of communism did happen and do happen under the US rule ( state terrorism, orwellian states et al).
This is the kind of stuff the infamous "school of the americas" provides:
c sherry.html
http://larc.sdsu.edu/humanrights/rr/PLAarticles/m
(Ever heard about plan condor? US trained military killing their own people??)