The US government is afraid Americans who go there would turn communist.. This is all about Communism, that's why you're not allowed to go there, because you might be re-educated.
Most likely the fear isn't that Americans would turn Communist, but that seeing Cuba as it actually is would undo over half a century of US propaganda about Communism. They might even start questioning other things the US Government claims. Which would be very bad news indeed for past and present members of Congress, the White House, the CIA, NSA, etc, etc.
Yep, seems the only people who hate Cuba are in the U.S. White House.
Some of them are in Florida too.
Canadians vacation in Cuba all the time, though their neighbors the Dominican Republic are usually more affordable.
Wonder how many US customers Air Tansat has...
Nevertheless, after reading about this registrar nonsense, I'm very tempted to transfer all my domain names to a dutch registrar "just in case".
Make sure you include enough personal information in your domain registration that your "Dutch registrar" can't ship the information out of the EU without breaking the law. Even if they were to be taken over by a US company.
Eventually nobody will want to do business with the Americans because it becomes too big a liability.
Especially if that doing business would require travelling to the US...
I think the US government and some wealthy are just royally pissed that Fidel, like Kim Jong-Il, didn't just 'vanish' or 'die".
Don't forget all the, failed, US Goverment's attempts to "deal with" Fidel Castro. Also I'm not convinced you can compare Cuba and North Korea, for one thing few "Westerners" would want to go to North Korea. If no Americans wanted to travel to Cuba there would be no need for a law stopping them. (With the rather obvious "hole" of US Citizens being able to enter and leave the US without showing a passport.)
They are supposed to hurt the country, which in turn makes the population unhappy with their leader, and the leader changes his/her ways or the leader gets changed.
As opposed to giving the country an obvious enemy. Ensuring the leader can blame them for anything which goes wrong, especially any economic problems (even more so if that other country would otherwise be a major trading partner).
The same goes for us here in the UK. We do get a lot of US shows but they're usually shown 9-18 months after being shown over there. I dont see why I shouldnt get to see The 4400, Heroes, Dexter or other great shows when everyone else sees them.
It's a bit more complex than that. In the US episodes are broadcast whilst production is still ongoing. Hence you can get a series which is cancelled "mid season". Just about nowhere else on the planet will not put up with the show some episodes then repeat them meme, no doubt those in the US wouldn't either if they were actually given the choice. It's quite possible for a North American (quite a lot of US TV is actually made in Canada) series to have it's first episodes shown first in the US or Canada and it's last episodes shown first in the UK. This was the case with Babylon 5 so it's been going on for at least a decade. You can even see this happening with torrents where the station idents (including DOGs) change...
Its even worse for anime. In the UK we get only a small fraction of the anime shown in the states and like there its usually the awful stuff made for kids with violence removed and annoyingly rubbish dubbed voices.
Again this is nothing new, "Battle of the Planets" from the 1980's had so much cut that US originated footage needed to be added so that viewers wouldn't notice the continuity gaps too much.
Most shows on the BBC are not going to be on American television stations unless the American producers decide to buy rights to show it.
In the case of drama series produced outside North America all episodes tend to be complete (and substantially paid for) before any are broadcast. The US approach of repeating episodes is at least as much to do with ensuring that production continues to be ahead of broadcast as it is about the quirks of gathering ratings in the US.
Also, the author was paid a visit by a Secret Service agent - the people who guard the life of the US President. It seems they were expected to stay on the same shift, in local time, no matter where in the world the President went. That is, if they work 9 to 5 Washington time, then fly to Iraq, say - where the president has visited a couple times - they are expected to then work 9 to 5 Iraqi time, without taking any time to get used to the time zone change.
If the US Government did not want to pay for them getting there in advance it might make more sense to work 9-5 Washington time regardless of where they actually happened to be.
The modern ones will be destroyed by bad/contaminated petrodiesel. For example, the old trick of mixing diesel with a little bit of gasoline during the winter (which worked fairly well for not-so-modern Diesel engines) will result in the aforementioned four-digit repair bill. As mentioned, it's more a matter of modern injection systems (common-rail, pump-nozzle) that rely on certain properties of the fuel (lubrication, cooling, chemical stability, boiling point), than of the engine itself.
These physical properties are dependent on temperature as well as any fuel contamination. Designing a machine which is fragile is just daft, especially one which is expensive and fragile. The "trick" of adding gasoline to diesel works because you are adding more "solvent" hydrocarbons which means that the temperature has to be lower before the solution becomes supersaturated. In both diesel and jet fuel something like half the fuel is actually disolved solids.
Requiring input (and verification) of additional details like name, age, etc. would allow those to be validated against existing records, spitting out exceptions for review.
Names are likly to give a lot of issues. Including alternative spellings, especially where one or more languages translation is involved, this can also apply where someone's name has been forced into a record structure which it does not actually fit into. People also change their names, for various reasons.
Wouldn't 99% of this problem - and many others - go away with a simple check digit on the SSN? Other countries (e.g. Canada) do it. Sure, it would be a bunch of work to issue everyone with a new 10-digit (or 12-digit) SSN, but the process would help to stem the current wave of identity theft.
The check digit algorithm would hardly remain secret for long. The basis of the problem is misuse of the identifier, rather than its format. i.e. if all anyone could do with your SSN was contribute to your pension/pay your income tax about the only possible problem would be if you were involved in a conspiracy to launder money. The identity fraud issue comes from systems which allow impersonation of people simply by knowing facts about them. Quite often not even especially obscure facts, such as names, names of relatives, SSN, education/employment history, present and past addresses, etc.
The quickest and easiest way to guarantee that would happen would be if a senior person within the DHS was declared dead.
Assuming that there are not special checks applied to the records of "patricans". Though this does appear to be the way that about the only data protection law in the US came into being.
In fact, a similar procedure would work well for most governmental policies - have the government work by it (and any unintended consequences) for 6 months before inflicting it on the general public.
Possibly extend the time to at least one year and exempt anyone who voted against it.
How about having your ID card canceled ON PURPOSE by a government that mistakenly puts you on the "terrorist" watch list, or because you didn't happen to bend over far enough for some beady eyed scumbag bureaucrat.
Or because you may have witnessed a crime by a government official. e.g. a police officer assaulting someone.
The modern, efficient diesel engines (pump-nozzle or common-rail injection) usually don't get clearance for biodiesel from their manufacturer. One bad batch of the stuff and you can kiss the engine goodbye, which usually comes with a four-digit bill attached to it.
It would be quite an achievement to build an engine which would cope with bad/contaminated petrodiesel whilst being potentially destroyed by biodiesel. Together with the irony of Rudolf Diesel's engines using vegetable oil. Indeed the gasoline engine appears to be the only common internal combustion engine designed from the start to use petroleum derived fuel.
Anytime you send something into service/repair for -any- company, regardless of what industry they are, you waive rights to that current hardware.
Actually this is generally not the case. Becuase the "law of the land" considers that the specific machine in question is and continues to be the customer's personal property. Unless they have agreed otherwise. Even such an agreement is unlikely to protect the company if they enguage in theft or vandalism...
some people call in a million times until they get the answer they want to hear.
How is this different from asking someone several times "Will you sell X to me?", "Can I borrrow Z?", "Will you marry me?", "Will you have sex with me?", etc, etc. There is little stopping one person asking another person the same question (or variations along the lines of "have you changed your mind about...") several times. That the asker/askee/both may be "corporate people" dosn't change this. A business would have a hard time convincing any court that a customer calling an advertised "customer service number" in relation to a matter of customer service would be grounds for granting any kind of "restraining order". Another variation on this is political lobbiests trying to get laws passed after the original proposal has been voted against.
Plus I'm sure in the eula/support agreement it states somewhere that their responsibility during repair is to restore the unit to its original factory condition - which means bye bye artwork.
The customer's negotiated agreement supercedes any "eula/support agreement". If this were not the case then the entire economy of any country daft enough write its contract law any other way would collapse in a very short order.
And for the CSR that told this guy his artwork would be preserved probably thought he was talking about after market skinning - which just pops off.
If Microsoft didn't understand what they had agreed to then the only person with a problem is Microsoft. Even if they did make a genuine mistake they are probably obliged to compensate the customer for their loss.
In fact with some premium support packages, it is explicit. For example at work we contract with MPC to provide our computers. Part of that is we get good support. Something breaks, I send them an e-mail saying "This part on this serial number is broken, I want a new one."
In which case they are specifically requesting a replacement.
They then send me a replacement, via next day air. I install it and get it working, then send them back the old one (which they pay shipping for) when I've got time. Net effect is we get computer fixed for people much faster. I don't care that it isn't the same motherboard or RAM or whatever that was in there before. It just needs to be one that is the same model and thus does the same job.
In the case of DRM or ofter "copy protection" which uses some kind of embedded serial number then something which is simply of the "same model" may well not do the same job.
A case like this is very unusual. Most people are made the happiest by the fastest turnaround in getting a fixed part, which often means giving them a part you already fixed.
The "most people want X" is reasonable when the customer dosn't give explicit instructions that they want something else to happen. (Including if they specifically request what would have happened anyway.) However in this case it does appear that the customer had agreed that something else would happen. An interesting aside is that some "swap outs" actually change to "collect and repair" where the case had some kind of indelible security marking. (You can even get the situation where if you mark every internal component with "Smart Water", but put none on the case the warentee is still "swap out"...)
I doubth the first person he asked said "I promise they won't clean it". He probably kept calling until he found someone who would say what he wanted to hear. I've worked in the biz, happens all the time. idiot calls in time and time again, gets the same answer. finally calls in and gets the answer he likes, then screams "broken verbal contract" when the first dozen calls he made gave the correct answer and the last call gave the wrong, desired answer.
This is called "negotiation". The only idiot here is the corporation in question. Part of the whole deal of corporations being "people" is that they can change their minds. What do you expect would happen if the boot was on the other foot with a customer or supplier stating "my original answer is the (only) correct one"?
If you bring a car to an auto shop, and they rip out your engine, do you let them get away with "oh well someone made a mistake"? "Our customer service representative wasn't authorized to make that promise"? "Our company's just too big man, there's nothing you can do about it! These things just happen."
Also you as a customer cannot possibly be expected to the internal structure and politics of any corporation they are dealing with. In some places it's actually the law that if a corporation agrees something with you it's binding on them. If their employee/agent didn't have the authority then that's their problem.
What the eff does free software have to do with the entertainment industry using Congress to bludgeon college students? I'd like to discuss the merits and shortcomings of your minifesto, it's just not relevant here.
Given that it is actually possible to "pirate" "free software" and that one of the entities which has actually managed to do so is the MPAA the matter probably is of some relevence.
Even entertainment has its value, but that doesn't mean that a week, or even a year of brilliance should be rewarded for a lifetime.
Should anyone continue to be paid for work they did decades ago. If you tried this just about anywhere other than in the entertainments industry you'd, at best, be ridiculed.
If those one or two works were all you had in you, move on to something else.
Or at least continue to do something, e.g. perform those two decades old songs.
What will state governments do next, mandate that schools become licensed distributors of RIAA/MPAA protected content, and that the revenue be used for funding the school.
In the process missing the irony that the MPAA has itself been enguaging in "piracy" more than once. So having these entities in charge of enforcement of copyright makes about as much sense as employing an unreformed criminal as a police chief.
It's possible to have this process make enough H2 on demand to power a car, but not within reasonability of getting the system small and light enough to compete with battery or air engine technology, and it's far more complex, expensive, and prone to trouble than any of the other technologies presented.
It's also pointless. Since if you have a portable system which can produce enough electrical power to produce hydrogen fast enough to power a car it's easier (and more efficent) to use it to drive either one electric motor connected to a gearbox and differential transmission or 2/4 connected directly to wheels.
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The US government is afraid Americans who go there would turn communist.. This is all about Communism, that's why you're not allowed to go there, because you might be re-educated.
Most likely the fear isn't that Americans would turn Communist, but that seeing Cuba as it actually is would undo over half a century of US propaganda about Communism. They might even start questioning other things the US Government claims. Which would be very bad news indeed for past and present members of Congress, the White House, the CIA, NSA, etc, etc.
Also, I believe it only mentions Raul and Fidel specificly, so if one of Fidel's sons took power, it would end.
Or they could just change their name...
Yep, seems the only people who hate Cuba are in the U.S. White House.
Some of them are in Florida too.
Canadians vacation in Cuba all the time, though their neighbors the Dominican Republic are usually more affordable.
Wonder how many US customers Air Tansat has...
Nevertheless, after reading about this registrar nonsense, I'm very tempted to transfer all my domain names to a dutch registrar "just in case".
Make sure you include enough personal information in your domain registration that your "Dutch registrar" can't ship the information out of the EU without breaking the law. Even if they were to be taken over by a US company.
Eventually nobody will want to do business with the Americans because it becomes too big a liability.
Especially if that doing business would require travelling to the US...
I think the US government and some wealthy are just royally pissed that Fidel, like Kim Jong-Il, didn't just 'vanish' or 'die".
Don't forget all the, failed, US Goverment's attempts to "deal with" Fidel Castro. Also I'm not convinced you can compare Cuba and North Korea, for one thing few "Westerners" would want to go to North Korea. If no Americans wanted to travel to Cuba there would be no need for a law stopping them. (With the rather obvious "hole" of US Citizens being able to enter and leave the US without showing a passport.)
They are supposed to hurt the country, which in turn makes the population unhappy with their leader, and the leader changes his/her ways or the leader gets changed.
As opposed to giving the country an obvious enemy. Ensuring the leader can blame them for anything which goes wrong, especially any economic problems (even more so if that other country would otherwise be a major trading partner).
The same goes for us here in the UK. We do get a lot of US shows but they're usually shown 9-18 months after being shown over there. I dont see why I shouldnt get to see The 4400, Heroes, Dexter or other great shows when everyone else sees them.
It's a bit more complex than that. In the US episodes are broadcast whilst production is still ongoing. Hence you can get a series which is cancelled "mid season". Just about nowhere else on the planet will not put up with the show some episodes then repeat them meme, no doubt those in the US wouldn't either if they were actually given the choice. It's quite possible for a North American (quite a lot of US TV is actually made in Canada) series to have it's first episodes shown first in the US or Canada and it's last episodes shown first in the UK. This was the case with Babylon 5 so it's been going on for at least a decade. You can even see this happening with torrents where the station idents (including DOGs) change...
Its even worse for anime. In the UK we get only a small fraction of the anime shown in the states and like there its usually the awful stuff made for kids with violence removed and annoyingly rubbish dubbed voices.
Again this is nothing new, "Battle of the Planets" from the 1980's had so much cut that US originated footage needed to be added so that viewers wouldn't notice the continuity gaps too much.
Most shows on the BBC are not going to be on American television stations unless the American producers decide to buy rights to show it.
In the case of drama series produced outside North America all episodes tend to be complete (and substantially paid for) before any are broadcast. The US approach of repeating episodes is at least as much to do with ensuring that production continues to be ahead of broadcast as it is about the quirks of gathering ratings in the US.
Also, the author was paid a visit by a Secret Service agent - the people who guard the life of the US President. It seems they were expected to stay on the same shift, in local time, no matter where in the world the President went. That is, if they work 9 to 5 Washington time, then fly to Iraq, say - where the president has visited a couple times - they are expected to then work 9 to 5 Iraqi time, without taking any time to get used to the time zone change.
If the US Government did not want to pay for them getting there in advance it might make more sense to work 9-5 Washington time regardless of where they actually happened to be.
The modern ones will be destroyed by bad/contaminated petrodiesel. For example, the old trick of mixing diesel with a little bit of gasoline during the winter (which worked fairly well for not-so-modern Diesel engines) will result in the aforementioned four-digit repair bill. As mentioned, it's more a matter of modern injection systems (common-rail, pump-nozzle) that rely on certain properties of the fuel (lubrication, cooling, chemical stability, boiling point), than of the engine itself.
These physical properties are dependent on temperature as well as any fuel contamination. Designing a machine which is fragile is just daft, especially one which is expensive and fragile.
The "trick" of adding gasoline to diesel works because you are adding more "solvent" hydrocarbons which means that the temperature has to be lower before the solution becomes supersaturated. In both diesel and jet fuel something like half the fuel is actually disolved solids.
Requiring input (and verification) of additional details like name, age, etc. would allow those to be validated against existing records, spitting out exceptions for review.
Names are likly to give a lot of issues. Including alternative spellings, especially where one or more languages translation is involved, this can also apply where someone's name has been forced into a record structure which it does not actually fit into. People also change their names, for various reasons.
Wouldn't 99% of this problem - and many others - go away with a simple check digit on the SSN? Other countries (e.g. Canada) do it. Sure, it would be a bunch of work to issue everyone with a new 10-digit (or 12-digit) SSN, but the process would help to stem the current wave of identity theft.
The check digit algorithm would hardly remain secret for long. The basis of the problem is misuse of the identifier, rather than its format. i.e. if all anyone could do with your SSN was contribute to your pension/pay your income tax about the only possible problem would be if you were involved in a conspiracy to launder money.
The identity fraud issue comes from systems which allow impersonation of people simply by knowing facts about them. Quite often not even especially obscure facts, such as names, names of relatives, SSN, education/employment history, present and past addresses, etc.
The quickest and easiest way to guarantee that would happen would be if a senior person within the DHS was declared dead.
Assuming that there are not special checks applied to the records of "patricans".
Though this does appear to be the way that about the only data protection law in the US came into being.
In fact, a similar procedure would work well for most governmental policies - have the government work by it (and any unintended consequences) for 6 months before inflicting it on the general public.
Possibly extend the time to at least one year and exempt anyone who voted against it.
A life insurance policy where the beneficiary is the insured person? How ... useful.
Some of them are ment to cover "funeral expenses". They might not want to pay for an underground house/crypt.
How about having your ID card canceled ON PURPOSE by a government that mistakenly puts you on the "terrorist" watch list, or because you didn't happen to bend over far enough for some beady eyed scumbag bureaucrat.
Or because you may have witnessed a crime by a government official. e.g. a police officer assaulting someone.
The modern, efficient diesel engines (pump-nozzle or common-rail injection) usually don't get clearance for biodiesel from their manufacturer. One bad batch of the stuff and you can kiss the engine goodbye, which usually comes with a four-digit bill attached to it.
It would be quite an achievement to build an engine which would cope with bad/contaminated petrodiesel whilst being potentially destroyed by biodiesel. Together with the irony of Rudolf Diesel's engines using vegetable oil. Indeed the gasoline engine appears to be the only common internal combustion engine designed from the start to use petroleum derived fuel.
Anytime you send something into service/repair for -any- company, regardless of what industry they are, you waive rights to that current hardware.
Actually this is generally not the case. Becuase the "law of the land" considers that the specific machine in question is and continues to be the customer's personal property. Unless they have agreed otherwise. Even such an agreement is unlikely to protect the company if they enguage in theft or vandalism...
some people call in a million times until they get the answer they want to hear.
How is this different from asking someone several times "Will you sell X to me?", "Can I borrrow Z?", "Will you marry me?", "Will you have sex with me?", etc, etc. There is little stopping one person asking another person the same question (or variations along the lines of "have you changed your mind about...") several times. That the asker/askee/both may be "corporate people" dosn't change this. A business would have a hard time convincing any court that a customer calling an advertised "customer service number" in relation to a matter of customer service would be grounds for granting any kind of "restraining order".
Another variation on this is political lobbiests trying to get laws passed after the original proposal has been voted against.
Plus I'm sure in the eula/support agreement it states somewhere that their responsibility during repair is to restore the unit to its original factory condition - which means bye bye artwork.
The customer's negotiated agreement supercedes any "eula/support agreement". If this were not the case then the entire economy of any country daft enough write its contract law any other way would collapse in a very short order.
And for the CSR that told this guy his artwork would be preserved probably thought he was talking about after market skinning - which just pops off.
If Microsoft didn't understand what they had agreed to then the only person with a problem is Microsoft. Even if they did make a genuine mistake they are probably obliged to compensate the customer for their loss.
In fact with some premium support packages, it is explicit. For example at work we contract with MPC to provide our computers. Part of that is we get good support. Something breaks, I send them an e-mail saying "This part on this serial number is broken, I want a new one."
In which case they are specifically requesting a replacement.
They then send me a replacement, via next day air. I install it and get it working, then send them back the old one (which they pay shipping for) when I've got time. Net effect is we get computer fixed for people much faster. I don't care that it isn't the same motherboard or RAM or whatever that was in there before. It just needs to be one that is the same model and thus does the same job.
In the case of DRM or ofter "copy protection" which uses some kind of embedded serial number then something which is simply of the "same model" may well not do the same job.
A case like this is very unusual. Most people are made the happiest by the fastest turnaround in getting a fixed part, which often means giving them a part you already fixed.
The "most people want X" is reasonable when the customer dosn't give explicit instructions that they want something else to happen. (Including if they specifically request what would have happened anyway.) However in this case it does appear that the customer had agreed that something else would happen.
An interesting aside is that some "swap outs" actually change to "collect and repair" where the case had some kind of indelible security marking. (You can even get the situation where if you mark every internal component with "Smart Water", but put none on the case the warentee is still "swap out"...)
I doubth the first person he asked said "I promise they won't clean it". He probably kept calling until he found someone who would say what he wanted to hear. I've worked in the biz, happens all the time. idiot calls in time and time again, gets the same answer. finally calls in and gets the answer he likes, then screams "broken verbal contract" when the first dozen calls he made gave the correct answer and the last call gave the wrong, desired answer.
This is called "negotiation". The only idiot here is the corporation in question. Part of the whole deal of corporations being "people" is that they can change their minds.
What do you expect would happen if the boot was on the other foot with a customer or supplier stating "my original answer is the (only) correct one"?
If you bring a car to an auto shop, and they rip out your engine, do you let them get away with "oh well someone made a mistake"? "Our customer service representative wasn't authorized to make that promise"? "Our company's just too big man, there's nothing you can do about it! These things just happen."
Also you as a customer cannot possibly be expected to the internal structure and politics of any corporation they are dealing with.
In some places it's actually the law that if a corporation agrees something with you it's binding on them. If their employee/agent didn't have the authority then that's their problem.
What the eff does free software have to do with the entertainment industry using Congress to bludgeon college students? I'd like to discuss the merits and shortcomings of your minifesto, it's just not relevant here.
Given that it is actually possible to "pirate" "free software" and that one of the entities which has actually managed to do so is the MPAA the matter probably is of some relevence.
Even entertainment has its value, but that doesn't mean that a week, or even a year of brilliance should be rewarded for a lifetime.
Should anyone continue to be paid for work they did decades ago. If you tried this just about anywhere other than in the entertainments industry you'd, at best, be ridiculed.
If those one or two works were all you had in you, move on to something else.
Or at least continue to do something, e.g. perform those two decades old songs.
What will state governments do next, mandate that schools become licensed distributors of RIAA/MPAA protected content, and that the revenue be used for funding the school.
In the process missing the irony that the MPAA has itself been enguaging in "piracy" more than once. So having these entities in charge of enforcement of copyright makes about as much sense as employing an unreformed criminal as a police chief.
It's possible to have this process make enough H2 on demand to power a car, but not within reasonability of getting the system small and light enough to compete with battery or air engine technology, and it's far more complex, expensive, and prone to trouble than any of the other technologies presented.
It's also pointless. Since if you have a portable system which can produce enough electrical power to produce hydrogen fast enough to power a car it's easier (and more efficent) to use it to drive either one electric motor connected to a gearbox and differential transmission or 2/4 connected directly to wheels.