With no functional live migration, no storage migration, no support for high availability without adding Red Hat clustering, no equivalent to DRS, no distributed networking, and a bunch of other "no's", Parallels Bare Metal includes only 1/10th of the features of the full-blown vSphere, so it only makes sense that it is 1/10th the cost.
Storage migration and VM migration are supported via a number of methods, including on-disk conversion of virtual machines, guest OS agent software, etc.
As to the rest, of course, none of these things are supported by ESXi unless you get vSphere and pay through your nose.
Red had clustering and GFS in Parallels is also a no-cost option.
Also, the ESXi hypervisor is free, and pretty much does everything that Parallels Bare Metal does. And, once you start spending $1000, vSphere becomes the clear winner.
No it does not "do everything Parallels Bare Metal does" since most of its functionality is crippled without vCenter.
As to the cost... right. A minimum 2 host HA capable system with vSphere will set you back at least $6k vs Parallels at $2k or even $1k (the small business edition that does not have fancy automation).
Also, the Parallels Bare Metal v5 (currently in beta) has most of the features of the ESX 3 series including vCenter, which is more then enough for most shops.
What Parallels does not have is all the pretty GUIs for all the features above, which I guess is your real problem.
You are using a Mac and do not know about the Parallels Bare Metal (from the same folks who make the Parallels Desktop for Mac)?
The thing is Linux based, has a Windows, OSX and Mac consoles and its cheaper then vSphere by a factor of 10 or so and requires no vCenter nonsense (its automation is cluster-based and distributed across hosts - the only sane approach in a VM datacenter!)
Oh and the VM format is compatible with the Mac version of Parallels.
You have power, fine food, many residences, people who are technically slaves, and as much material good as you can sell in a lifetime.
Wrong again. Only one residence (and an occasional cabin in the woods they called a "datcha") all tiny by Western standards. None of the Soviet officials could sell much "material goods" for personal profit either (and they did not). Also many were actual believers in the system.
When the Soviet system collapsed, most of its upper level officials were downright broke along with the rest of the populace. That is why virtually all of the "oligarchs" did not come from the ranks of the upper echelons of the former Soviet system but were outsiders who operated on the black market using Western connections and who were catapulted to prominence when their former enemies became powerless.
In the Soviet Union a small-time black-market con man had usually more money then a director of a shipyard or a member of the Politburo.
Just because you are not counting the billions of rubles that IN THEORY you do not have.
By this definition, Obama and some few people in congress are the richest men in the world, no? I mean they do get to control the US budget and that is more money than any individual living has...
And then there is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve! Another multi-trillionaire, no?
You know, discussions with people who are so rabidly ideological as you are rarely productive since when you are shown to be ignorant of everything 10 feet beyond your nose or just completely wrong in general, you simply change definitions of words to suit your wold-view, in which words mean whatever you need them to mean for you to feel smugly smarter and more righteous then everyone else.
An in this case it is the word "rich". In the real world outside your fantasies, in order to be rich a person has to have his own private property, a concept completely at odds with the Soviet system which was not only not set up for such a scenario but actively hostile to it.
That is so deluded it is astounding that someone would bother to type it much less believe it.
Since I am apparently dealing with someone who believes that a CEO of a corporation automatically owns all of the investor's money or that a politician owns all the nation's funds as soon as he gets into office, there is little we have to "discuss".
Given this, you also probably should go back on your meds before accusing others of "delusions".
What your mouth-foaming rant fails to mention is that in Soviet Russia, and every other government through the entire history of humanity, the "rich and connected" are ALWAYS on top. That is not a vision of any system; That is a REALITY of any system.
Actually, no. The unique feature of the Soviet system was that while the top connected individuals were indeed surrounded by privilege, they were never technically rich. Most top Soviet officials and their families lived in apartment buildings which were tiny compared to a typical house of an even minor Western industrialist or a politician.
The aphrodisiac of the Soviet system was raw unchallenged power over others, not wealth.
It is only after the system collapsed when the "oligarchs" "buying" entire national industries for pennies on a dollar during Yeltsin's drunken binges appeared.
Any system that chooses to pretend this will not happen is doomed before it begins. The BEST you can hope for in any system is some way to plan around that aspect and take advantage of it the best you can
Which precautions have clearly failed in the West. Hence my point. Democracy and its "checks and balances" are now completely circumvented for good. Results are sure to follow.
I just laugh and laugh when spoiled assholes like yourself claim you are under anything even close to "fascism". It's a long road from where we are today in any modern Western state to the real fascists.
I think that particular fallacy is called "It Can't Happen Here!". Lots of "Good Germans" swore by a similar idea. Note to the history-challenged: pre-Nazi germany was a Western (by definition) Constitutional Democracy (called the Weimar Republic).
The very fact you do not have a bullet in the pan right now just goes to show how laughable your assertion really is.
Most people did not have a "bulled in the pan" in Germany in 1930 either.
But when my memories of crossing the Soviet border (something you clearly never did) circa early 1980s compare favourably with those of the USA border of 2010, something is clearly wrong with this picture, don't you think?
Absent an armed revolution, Fascism is not an all-or-nothing, black-or-white deal when one day you live in a freedom-loving, personal-liberties-cherishing place and the next morning a Fascist Dictatorship. Instead, Fascism (or systems like it) are introduced via a creeping progression, always.
And the West has been creeping towards it for two good decades, at first slowly, now rapidly accelerating. Just use your head: in the 1950s USA the "porn scanners" and "full body gropes" (of children, no less) would have been unthinkable and would have been - quite correctly - seen as an idea straight form a Soviet or a Nazi playbook. Fast forward to 2011....
Also when one talks about Fascism, or Fascism-like progressions, it is given that there will not be an exact repetition of the events of the mid 20th century. History never repeats itself exactly, it merely plays on the same theme. The new rendition of the oppression will be quite different in technical details, but very much the same as far as its victims are concerned (for example its most likely it will be Moslems in the camps - which will be euphemistically called something entirely different, instead of Jews).
What you seeing here is the inevitable end result of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact block falling apart as they were the only thing holding back the Western authoritarians and autocrats from enacting their visions of "Law and Order" (with rich and connected people on top).
That is because in their panic fear of the worker slaves in the 1930s they painted themselves into a corner by equating the Soviets with the Devil and so anything even remotely resembling the activities of the Politburo (bad, good or otherwise) was automatically indigestible to the Western public spoon-fed the "we are the Free World" bullshit propaganda.
Now that the boogeyman against whom to measure the West is gone (China is nowhere near ideologically and in practice it is an oligarchic kleptocracy in all but name, a system that most powerful people in the West envy greatly) and so gone are all the constraints on the Western ruling classes as propaganda can now focus on fake "safety" from enemies downright medieval who do not even sport a functioning country of their own. Fascism redux is pretty much unavoidable except this time there will be no "good guys" to fight it and who knows how many technologically-assisted dystopian Dark Age centuries will follow.
We all can see this coming as its major elements are already in place. Denial is no longer an option for sane people.
A yacht is far less expensive then you think. Satellite connections (that work in the high seas) are far more expensive then you think.
You pay per megabyte at outrageous rates (your caps are also measured in megabytes). Your equipment that can track the satellite while the yacht is yawing and pitching costs more then the radar and the chart plotter to navigate your boat by etc and so on.
Oh and the latency of the satellite connection is always more than 1000ms... since it takes more than a second at a speed of light for the signal to bounce off of a satellite.
In short: satellite connection suck donkey balls for gaming of any sort. Even if you are a multimillionaire you can't do squat about the atrocious lag since you are up against laws of physics.
The writing is on the wall: the browser-as-OS gambit is intended to warm people up to the notion of software in the "cloud", and software in the cloud will inevitably lead to subscriptions. Once the instructions no longer even execute on your hardware, you're a hostage.
You have a point in general - the "trend" amongst the more scheming and greedy software (and many other) companies is definitely towards attempting to exact rent and ultimately to recreate the ole landed gentry/peasants dynamics.
But on the other hand with platforms using web-browsers as primary interface which allow applications based on HTML5/JavaScript - which are fully open standards - we do have Linux/Apache/Postgress/what-not available to us where we can make and host these apps, free as in "beer" and "speech" both, completely outside control of any would-be gatekeeper and his "app store".
So its in actuality a browser based system (as long as its APIs are completely open) that is far less likely to become a hostage-taking platform then any other system which requires - say - a specially licensed SDK or a signing certificate from its lord and master, since there is nothing whatsoever stopping you from making and running your own app-hosting server.
It seems many of you don't know (as did I until not so long ago) that Parallels, the virtualization folks of Mac fame, also do "Parallels Bare Metal" which is essentially a direct attack on VMWare's lunch money.
The Parallels Bare Metal 4 is near VMWare ESX 2.x functionality or so but the new Parallels Bare Metal 5 (which is now in beta) has pretty much most of the VMWare 3.x-4.x ESX/vSphere series features. Although it is much more command-line centric - which is good for some of us - and the procedures for converting physical and virtual machines from other vendors are quite different - which you simply have to learn and get used to (yes you can convert ESX/vSphere crap on-disk and via Parallels "importer" in-guest agent).
The thing comes with Windows, OSX and Linux management consoles ala the VMWare editions of old.
So for all of you out there who need to appease corporate demons with a commercial product with proper support arrangements etc, take a look.
I was quite pleasantly surprised and I am holding back any moves to vSphere 5 for many of my clients with the aim of deploying Parallels instead.
Oh and pricing: $499 per-host (no idiotic per-core or per-ram or per-disk nonsense here) for "Small Business" (which has everything you need really, even for big shops since you can script everything using their command line tools) or $999 for their "Standard" which comes with a wacky centralized automation/web-interface/event-ticket/delegation/who-knows-what-else management gizmo.
See those numbers and weep, oh vSphere 5 victims!
They also have a "Virtuozo" product that seems aimed at the VPS rental market.
Wikipedia says (citing Iraq Body Count) that up to 12/2010, civilian casualties are between 99,000 and 108,000-- a combined total from insurgency, coalition, and US forces.
Err... No. Even Wikipedia (never a reliable source at the best of times and despite vigorous editing by various apologists) still retains links to various surveys.
If you look at the figures from Afghanistan, we see that about 75% of the casualties THERE were caused by "anti-government elements"; so if we extrapolate from Afghanistan to Iraq (not unreasonable IMO, unless you have more accurate figures), then we have a whopping 25,000 civilian casualties, over nearly 10 years, in a war where the enemy intentionally blends itself into the population.
It doesn't work that way. The credit for all war casualties is ultimately at the door of whomever started the war. That is why blame for all casualties of WWII rests firmly on the members of the Axis, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in particular.
That is why Hitler was so desperate to create an illusion of being attacked by Poland.
That is also why all casualties in Iraq are hanging around the neck of the "coalition of the willing" and its chief warmonger - USA - in particular.
There is indeed a secondary factor, that of "high moral ground" which usually speaks to utter hypocrisy of those who claim to be the "shining city on the hill" and who pretend to follow laws and care for human rights, all the while engaging in systematic thuggery of the vilest kind - the US being foremost amongst such nations - but that is another issue altogether.
Which war are you referring to, and how long did it last? Antietam hit nearly 23,000 in a day, IIRC. And comparing a war from the 21st century to a 19th century war is disingenuous in the extreme; why are you discounting the 20th century wars (vietnam, WW2, WW1, etc)?
Your claim was that Iraq casualties were, quote: "far far far lower than in any prior war that I can think of" (emphasis mine).
I pointed out several cases off the top of my head, which shows that either you were completely ignorant or (a far more likely scenario given your reply) that you engaged in a very popular amongst US denizens sport of revisionist history to justify the wholly unjustifiable actions of the US Empire.
... Our civilian casualties for this war are far far far lower than in any prior war that I can think of...
Iraq affair alone had around a million of civilian casualties by various credible estimates, about 80000 of which were directly confirmed. Plus about 2.5 million refugees.
Unless you mean World Wars I and II or or one of the Japanese Imperial or US Imperial Conquests, a typical conflict in the 19th century had less then 100,000 casualties on both sides, vast majority of them soldiers. 20th century conflicts, such as the Spanish Civil War where Hitler's forces (yes, we are talking genuine swastika-totting Nazis here) engaged on behalf of Franco had around 500,000 casualties (measured in a similar way as those in Iraq) and about 450,000 refugees.
And so on.
With such mendacious, apologist, revisionist bullshit at the very start, any arguments of yours that follow have pretty much zero credibility.
That is why there are impeachment and recall laws to fix issue just like that. Also any opposing political party would demand the person resign.
Not only most countries do not have "recall" laws or anything resembling impeachment, but cases when such scandals erupted and the politico in question served his full term laughing at the voters and doing all sorts of damage are aplenty. Hell, in some cases the politician was convicted in the court of law and even then still refused to resign and had to be forcibly booted out of whatever body he was a member in. Not to mention that any legal proceedings against the crook can be successfully stalled for so long that his term is likely to end before the impeachment even gets going properly.
Furthermore, while I keep pointing out proactive measures that empower the electorate, you keep insisting on reactive, post-facto measures that not only dis-empower voters but go against the grain of the whole democracy thing by requiring censorship and other forms of muzzling media, citizens and politicians.
I so not understand the point about "authorities" since all campaigning, not just negative information, is prohibited.
Who, pray tell, gets to decide what is "campaigning" and what is not?! Who decides what actions are in "violation" of the laws?! It is the "authorities", i.e. the members of the government - be it its judicial or executive branches - who do! Next I expect you are going to tell me that they are wholly, impeccably impartial and make such decisions from the purity of their noble hearts, completely focused on the well being of the nation and its denizens in their incorruptible minds...
Conversely, and much more likely, what would happen if a false claim was put forward at the last minute which swung the vote? Do you really think the election would be re-run? How would someone prove that the outcome was changed? There is no way to check each individual vote to see if the false report had any effect. How could one prove it was done by the candidate? Maybe it was done by a misguided supporter but still had the same effect. Without solid proof nothing will happen.
So on the one hand we have certainties, i.e. a bona-fide crook being elected when the electorate was dis-enfranchised and forbidden from knowing the truth and on the other hand we have "coulda-woulda-shoulda" voodoo whereby no one can tell what impact what statements had on the elections but the electorate still remains fully empowered to make decisions on whatever information is available, no matter its source or quality. In one corner the nanny-state is "protecting" poor wee idiot voters "from themselves" by denying all of them all information it can lay its paws on and in the other one we have a possibility that some of the voters might be misled by late game chicanery (assuming that none of the counter-measures I described repeatedly are taken).
It is then of little surprise that I believe that empowering voters (at the risk of finding out that some of them are idiots and can't handle uncertain, last minute information) is the democratic thing to do while it is also quite obvious that you find censorship, dubious and highly corruptible "protections" of a nanny-state and general distrust of the choices of voters in favour of a blind trust in the authorities so much more your cup of tea.
That is because, quite contrary to what you believe yourself to be, you are not a proponent of democracy but rather an authoritarian. You find some, select aspects of democracy agreeable only as long as they can be used as part of an unassailable "authority" that you desperately need in your life to make important decisions for you and for others. For their own "good", no doubt.
The insistence that and restriction on speech is dogma.
One cannot help but notice that your "arguments" would have somewhat more impact if only they were grammatical. Or coherent.
As it is however, your above "sentence" makes no sense whatsoever. Nevertheless, I take a liberty of guessing that you wish to accuse me of being "dogmatic", which is quite amusing given my ample explanations for the many reasons behind my statements, which thus prevents them from being "dogmatic".
By definition.
In this, I also took a leap of assuming that you've read the contents of your own link, which might be a bit optimistic on my part.
1. If an untrue statement about a candidate is released close to voting time there is no time to gather factual information to refute the claim. Sorry but "I didn't do it" is not sufficient. Anyone voting on that information can not retract their vote when the truth comes out.
That assumes (no surprise there) that censorship is the only recourse. Halting (or even cancelling and postponing) elections in such extreme cases never came to your mind, naturally.
How do you think the electorate will feel the morning after when they discover that their choice did in fact happen to be a corrupt crook, only that this information was suppressed and hidden from them by the "authorities" in the name of "fairness"?! Bonus points if the crook-elect is also a personal friend of key members of these "authorities"!
2. I just noticed your handle IgnoramosMaxumis which translated to Big Idiot. On that note I will consider the source of the dogmatic replies and act accordingly.
Since your "arguments" have dwindled so completely as to leave you only with an assault on my Slashdot alias as your last remaining desperate ploy, I therefore accept this as your plea for mercy in this dialogue.
Some nice definition of stability you have there, with a dozen of those having been considered worthy of EU and NATO membership...
That's a laughable set of criteria.
NATO would gobble up Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Mongolia if they could get away with it. "Stability" was never NATO's concern, sticking it to Russia and its allies at all costs, wagging their collective dicks around Middle East and generally trying to provide markets for its top member's military-industrial-complex are the goals of NATO. The utter lie of NATO's original mandate (to oppose the Warsaw Pact) became quite transparent nearly three decades ago.
As to EU, its stability as a whole is quite shaky. I am not sure if you noticed, but even its founding members are in dire straights. See also under: Greece and Portugal.
Off the top of my had, you may want to check the name Forza Italia and the recent political history of Netherlands. Furthermore, in a multi-party environment, unlike in the case of e.g. the US, a party does not need to win the majority to get some influence on country policy - it is enough to grow large enough to be worth including in a majority coalition. In many countries various ecological movements gain disproportionate influence by this mechanism.
I grow tired of this. You've got two examples, one in a country that is famous for most of its governments to last less than a month for most of the 20th century. And all of these countries have also other laws, like public financing of campaigns, which truly are responsible for their state of affairs, despite the censorship. I dare you to explain how censorship is, in any way, responsible for their "multiparty coalition" character - not that it actually matters in practice in most of them: they are still ruled by two major parties that control them for most of the last 6 decades, merely that the two majors cannot do it entirely alone....
No, you do not need to actually block such communications. It is enough to record them and judicially punish the offending parties post factum (including mandate cancelling if justified).
Again, I marvel at your smug confidence in the divine powers of the "authorities" and how horribly dissonant it is with your protestations of your defense of ideals of democracy and how well it instead fits an authoritarian mindset that you actually display in your reasoning.
I think I mentioned, just about 20 times now, that communications on the Internet and many, many other modes of transmission can be made anonymously. In which case the "authorities" are unable to determine who transmitted what and for what purpose. "Smearing" oneself and then pointing a finger at the other guy becomes quite viable and effective maneuver, particularly if one acts in collusion with these "authorities". Not to mention camouflaging "smears" as "breaking news" (which is when the "authorities" get to decide on what is and what is not "news"). Etc and so on.
As I keep repeating, censorship, being the very anathema of democracy, always damages its implementation. No matter what convoluted excuse is used to introduce it.
The fact that you call them so does not create reality, you know. Democracy is not identical to unrestricted freedom. Actually, there have been cases when unrestricted freedom caused a once-powerful country to fall - check the history of Poland for an example. Also, some limitations of the democratic process have been recognised (see early 20th century history of Germany for two examples) and I believe it is only prodent to put in place some guards not to repeat the same mistakes again.
None of this has anything whatsoever to do with censorship. Or "unrestricted freedom" (which is Anarchy btw). Democracy fundamentally depends on free and unrestricted speech and compromising this ability by definition compromi
If that were true, smaller parties would be severely disadvantaged and would gradually disappear. Care to run a reality check for some European countries, where such laws are in effect?
Curious that you mentioned it: what was the last time in European democracies (barring the unstable former Warsaw Pact countries) when a small party grew in size to win elections? Last I checked such an event was extremely rare and it is the establishment (usually represented by two similarly-flavoured parties - even though they are sometimes called by drastically opposite names) that grows to swallow all else leaving only a perpetual token presence of minor "fringe" parties that never hope to win more than a few seats.
I call bullshit. At least in the case of my country, there are no exceptions whatsoever to the radio silence period and all the media refrain from reporting anything even remotely political - which actually looks kinda weird, as for a day or two news program are filled with absolute trivialities.
So do you plan to pull the plug on the Internet too? Since it is obvious that it is the only way to enforce such an inane law in the 21st century when "mass media" is in decline and Internet in ascendance...
What about email? Mass SMS messages?
Or do you plan to keep your head in the sand and hope that censorship of some types of media somehow justifies the deeply flawed premise?
Again, please run a reality check. All media are forbidden to report anything that could be considered election-related or politics-related. There have been some highly-publicised early transgressions that ended up with huge fines and universal disapproval, and now the situation is absolutely clean election after election.
How do you fine a foreign blogger who lives out of jurisdiction? Or do your inane laws apply to the whole planet?
Citation needed. There are in fact multiple censorship laws in force around the world, like forbidding publishing Nazi ideology, hate speech etc., and democracy does not seem to suffer as a result. Care to point to some example country where there is no such restrictions and democracy actually flourishes?
All of them are undemocratic, rather obviously. The fact that democracy doesn't outright crumble overnight when such laws are passed to erode it does not constitute an argument for them. But every one of these laws weakens democracy because it takes out of the public discourse controversial ideas which someone, somewhere dislikes and labels "hate". In Canada, for example, "hate speech" laws were successfully used by right-wing groups to muzzle opponents of the Afghanistan military adventure while these same "hate speech" laws could not be used to get a right-wing Jewish extremist to shut up (probably the fact that the "hate speech" court is staffed by people affiliated with Israel had something to do with it). Cases like this are aplenty wherever "hate speech" laws are in effect.
There are multiple ways in which smaller players are being favoured in many countries I know of, including mandatory airtime in public media and state-allotted funds for running both the party and the campaign itself.
Those are laws that actually help democracy and they are responsible for the smaller parties surviving and these laws, not the censorship idiocy, are responsible for the greater richness of European politics when compared to countries which do not have such laws. Laws like this can only be applauded as they are indeed very democratic in nature.
If what you claim were true, the discussed laws would grossly favour current political establishment, and the government side in particular. Care to check whet the situation actually looks like in Europe and how often ruling parties change?
What is there not to compare? UK (and many other Western "democracies") have long since lost their way and became "two-party establishment" systems. In many cases the two parties even have nearly the exact same major agendas. That is why it was possible for a leader of a supposedly "Labour" party to be a champion for worker-dispossessing globalization and an ass-kissing side-kick to a authoritarian war-monger at the helm of a super-power. Examples of the recent decline of the UK and other Western democracies are endless.
And censorship laws to "protect" democracy are just one such.
You are clutching at straws. Why do you think that thepolice couldn't trace an overseas broadcast?
Which part of "out of jurisdiction" do you not grasp?
Do you think there is no such thing as interpol, cross-country police co-operation?
Which part of "out of jurisdiction" do you not grasp? Or do you believe that inane UK election laws apply to the whole planet?
The UK (or whoever) national responsible would be guilty of breaking the UK election law and sent to prison.
So you do believe that UK laws apply to non-UK citizens abroad, throughout the globe. No surprise, really, but it does advance your "credibility" just that one bit further...
In any case, bizarre anonymous overseas broadcasts are not what most peopole spend their evenings listening to, it's the BBC/ITV.
Not anymore, Internet is replacing the traditional mass media, Internet that makes such anonymous broadcasts truly cheap and easy. That is why censorship of the Internet is now at the forefront of the self anointed "protectors" of democracy and their "we had to destroy the village to save it" muzzling campaigns.
Jesus H Christ you're stupid. If you tried that in the UK, you'd be in prison for a while. Oh sorry, I forgot we're just a banana republic so we don't count.
It has not only been tried (example here), but it has been done so repeatedly all over the UK and no, no one went to prison for it.
Did you just call Australia a banana republic?
You just lost whatever your argument was hands down, you utter twat.
Australian and incidentally UK (and many others) democracies have been steadily sliding backwards into autocracy over many decades, evidence of which can be had in pretty much every other headline.
Also, calling someone a "twat" is not exactly a conclusively winning argument in a debate, no matter what your mother told you.
In the UK, we suffer under the horrible evil of not being able to hear politicians lie about each other during election day, it's barely credible that such tyranny can exist.
In which case why forbid it? Since it apparently has no effect whatsoever, its just "lies about each other"... or it has one so profound that the whole democratic process teeters on the edge of collapse and so laws have to be made to "protect" it from this dire danger....
You seem incapable of appreciating that the release of a smear campaign during an election (that is, when people are either actually voting or just about to vote) can sway voters as there may not be enough time for a response.
No, it is you who are incapable of realizing that stopping a "smear campaign" is impossible and that these laws have nothing whatsoever to do with the effort (other then their pretense).
If "smear campaigns" were really the concern, efforts exactly opposite to censorship would be taken: kiosks at polls where last minute replies/appeals of all candidates, free of charge, could be uploaded. A national "elections TV" and "elections radio" channel where very same appeals could be broadcast etc.
Democracy is based on free flow of information and censorship, being the very anathema of democracy, never "helps" or benefits it. Under NO circumstances. NO exceptions.
Anyone who believes that muzzling someone is to "help" democracy has either no clue what democracy is or is an authoritarian who is using the term "democracy" in the same way as the Nazis did: as a mere means to an end - gaining power.
... there is something to it.
That is the famous "a million flies cannot be wrong" argument. Otherwise known as the argumentum ad potentiam logical fallacy.
It's not factual information that's the propble, it's lies, innuendoes, false allegations and the rest.
And of course it is the "authorities" who get to decide what is a "lie" or "innuendo" or a "false allegation" etc and what mere "reporting", no?
Who said anything about supervision?
What else can actions of a nanny-state aimed at controlling access to information by the voters be called?
No, again people are saying you can have as much in formation as you can handle, just not for a short time period.
... or else "voters will go into stupor", no? You do realize that you just confirmed the very thing you tried to refute, don't you?
In most countries outside the US and Russia, billionaires aren't generally politicians (and vice vversa). Political parties ae composed of normal human beings, who just need an equal fair crack of the whip.
Actually, no. In most Western democracies most politicians are either directly millionaires or are directly backed by billionaires. Furthermore, a typical election budget of a major party runs into hundreds of millions of dollars. Parties themselves are usually multi-hundred-million dollar enterprises. Then there are media moguls who control (unlike the olden days) most major media in the world who are also affiliated with political parties.
In short, it is the very small time passionate candidates who get completely destroyed by these laws (as was intended by the creators of these laws all along).
I tire of repeating myself over and over. Read my other posts in this thread.
I will only give you these hints: advertising has en effect that diminishes with time, so an established party with a huge budget and repeated media recognition (like the current government) will suffer far less then a small party whose tiny budget offered it only a modicum of advertising before the "cooling off" period. By the time the election comes the effect of advertising of smaller players will be nullified.
As to the government being disadvantaged it is laughable. Exactly the opposite happens (that is why the laws were made - by the governments in power) as it affords whomever is controlling the process an opportunity to indirectly harass the other players by either accusing them of "breaking the law" or making exceptions for the ruling elite because of "particularly malicious attacks" etc. And then there is the fact that most media these days are owned by affiliates of one of the major parties or even outright by candidates themselves and media are not exempt from "reporting" on the other, usually "upstart" challengers, who of course have no recourse.
And so on.
Censorship never "helps" democracy. It is in fact the very anathema of it.
If the laws were truly meant to help democracy they would concern themselves with ensuring that smaller players have a level playing field and that all candidates have a chance to make last-second replies. They would ensure that the voters get maximum exposure to information, complete with information kiosks at the polls where all parties could post last minute appeals free of charge so they stay fresh in the voter's minds, etc and so on.
Well, that's true but laws also have to have a modicum of rationality behind them to begin with. And I am pointing out, repeatedly in the face of really pig-headed refusals to accept the obvious, that laws instituting censorship to "help" democracy are like laws instituting mandatory burkas in the effort to "help" self determination of women...
Particularly when the said "crimes" are wholly made up and if missing even one instance invalidates the whole premise of the law, no?
I'm starting to see now. You're paranoid AND stupid. False flag operation... for fuck's sake. Embargoes around certain activities close or during polling are to stop people interfering with the result of a free and fair election. It's not some conspiracy no matter how much you wish it were.
And I note, again that you failed to explain how censorship (you are calling it an "embargo" now to make it sound less devious) is supposed to help "fairness". I already pointed out a myriad ways in which it helps the electoral process become unfair.
Furthermore, your "arguments" have now devolved into mere swearing. A sure sign of a lost debate.
Your counter arguments are not reasonable, they're insane.
See above. If they are "insane", they are surely very easy to refute. Which you somehow forgot to do.
Sorry but a restriction for a few hours for the greater good is not censorship it is common sense.
What "common good"?! Explain. All I want from you and all the other posters to explain, using reason and logic, how censorship is supposed to serve this "common good". So far no-one has been able to do so. Instead I've heard "reasons" such as "they've made it a law so it must be something", "voters can't vote 'right' if given unauthorized - by the authorities - information", "voters are too stupid to vote unsupervised", "voters will go into stupor if given too much data", "poor downtrodden billionaire candidate B won't be able to reply to evil billionaire candidate A in time", etc.
Not a single logical or reasonable argument as to how these kinds of laws provide for "common good" although it is plain to see how they can greatly advantage certain - particularly major and established in power - groups and how they are thus deeply undemocratic.
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Storage migration and VM migration are supported via a number of methods, including on-disk conversion of virtual machines, guest OS agent software, etc.
As to the rest, of course, none of these things are supported by ESXi unless you get vSphere and pay through your nose.
Red had clustering and GFS in Parallels is also a no-cost option.
No it does not "do everything Parallels Bare Metal does" since most of its functionality is crippled without vCenter.
As to the cost ... right. A minimum 2 host HA capable system with vSphere will set you back at least $6k vs Parallels at $2k or even $1k (the small business edition that does not have fancy automation).
Also, the Parallels Bare Metal v5 (currently in beta) has most of the features of the ESX 3 series including vCenter, which is more then enough for most shops.
What Parallels does not have is all the pretty GUIs for all the features above, which I guess is your real problem.
You are using a Mac and do not know about the Parallels Bare Metal (from the same folks who make the Parallels Desktop for Mac)?
The thing is Linux based, has a Windows, OSX and Mac consoles and its cheaper then vSphere by a factor of 10 or so and requires no vCenter nonsense (its automation is cluster-based and distributed across hosts - the only sane approach in a VM datacenter!)
Oh and the VM format is compatible with the Mac version of Parallels.
Wrong again. Only one residence (and an occasional cabin in the woods they called a "datcha") all tiny by Western standards. None of the Soviet officials could sell much "material goods" for personal profit either (and they did not). Also many were actual believers in the system.
When the Soviet system collapsed, most of its upper level officials were downright broke along with the rest of the populace. That is why virtually all of the "oligarchs" did not come from the ranks of the upper echelons of the former Soviet system but were outsiders who operated on the black market using Western connections and who were catapulted to prominence when their former enemies became powerless.
In the Soviet Union a small-time black-market con man had usually more money then a director of a shipyard or a member of the Politburo.
By this definition, Obama and some few people in congress are the richest men in the world, no? I mean they do get to control the US budget and that is more money than any individual living has...
And then there is the Chairman of the Federal Reserve! Another multi-trillionaire, no?
You know, discussions with people who are so rabidly ideological as you are rarely productive since when you are shown to be ignorant of everything 10 feet beyond your nose or just completely wrong in general, you simply change definitions of words to suit your wold-view, in which words mean whatever you need them to mean for you to feel smugly smarter and more righteous then everyone else.
An in this case it is the word "rich". In the real world outside your fantasies, in order to be rich a person has to have his own private property, a concept completely at odds with the Soviet system which was not only not set up for such a scenario but actively hostile to it.
Since I am apparently dealing with someone who believes that a CEO of a corporation automatically owns all of the investor's money or that a politician owns all the nation's funds as soon as he gets into office, there is little we have to "discuss".
Given this, you also probably should go back on your meds before accusing others of "delusions".
Actually, no. The unique feature of the Soviet system was that while the top connected individuals were indeed surrounded by privilege, they were never technically rich. Most top Soviet officials and their families lived in apartment buildings which were tiny compared to a typical house of an even minor Western industrialist or a politician.
The aphrodisiac of the Soviet system was raw unchallenged power over others, not wealth.
It is only after the system collapsed when the "oligarchs" "buying" entire national industries for pennies on a dollar during Yeltsin's drunken binges appeared.
Which precautions have clearly failed in the West. Hence my point. Democracy and its "checks and balances" are now completely circumvented for good. Results are sure to follow.
I think that particular fallacy is called "It Can't Happen Here!". Lots of "Good Germans" swore by a similar idea. Note to the history-challenged: pre-Nazi germany was a Western (by definition) Constitutional Democracy (called the Weimar Republic).
Most people did not have a "bulled in the pan" in Germany in 1930 either.
But when my memories of crossing the Soviet border (something you clearly never did) circa early 1980s compare favourably with those of the USA border of 2010, something is clearly wrong with this picture, don't you think?
Absent an armed revolution, Fascism is not an all-or-nothing, black-or-white deal when one day you live in a freedom-loving, personal-liberties-cherishing place and the next morning a Fascist Dictatorship. Instead, Fascism (or systems like it) are introduced via a creeping progression, always.
And the West has been creeping towards it for two good decades, at first slowly, now rapidly accelerating. Just use your head: in the 1950s USA the "porn scanners" and "full body gropes" (of children, no less) would have been unthinkable and would have been - quite correctly - seen as an idea straight form a Soviet or a Nazi playbook. Fast forward to 2011....
Also when one talks about Fascism, or Fascism-like progressions, it is given that there will not be an exact repetition of the events of the mid 20th century. History never repeats itself exactly, it merely plays on the same theme. The new rendition of the oppression will be quite different in technical details, but very much the same as far as its victims are concerned (for example its most likely it will be Moslems in the camps - which will be euphemistically called something entirely different, instead of Jews).
What you seeing here is the inevitable end result of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact block falling apart as they were the only thing holding back the Western authoritarians and autocrats from enacting their visions of "Law and Order" (with rich and connected people on top).
That is because in their panic fear of the worker slaves in the 1930s they painted themselves into a corner by equating the Soviets with the Devil and so anything even remotely resembling the activities of the Politburo (bad, good or otherwise) was automatically indigestible to the Western public spoon-fed the "we are the Free World" bullshit propaganda.
Now that the boogeyman against whom to measure the West is gone (China is nowhere near ideologically and in practice it is an oligarchic kleptocracy in all but name, a system that most powerful people in the West envy greatly) and so gone are all the constraints on the Western ruling classes as propaganda can now focus on fake "safety" from enemies downright medieval who do not even sport a functioning country of their own. Fascism redux is pretty much unavoidable except this time there will be no "good guys" to fight it and who knows how many technologically-assisted dystopian Dark Age centuries will follow.
We all can see this coming as its major elements are already in place. Denial is no longer an option for sane people.
A yacht is far less expensive then you think. Satellite connections (that work in the high seas) are far more expensive then you think.
You pay per megabyte at outrageous rates (your caps are also measured in megabytes). Your equipment that can track the satellite while the yacht is yawing and pitching costs more then the radar and the chart plotter to navigate your boat by etc and so on.
Oh and the latency of the satellite connection is always more than 1000ms ... since it takes more than a second at a speed of light for the signal to bounce off of a satellite.
In short: satellite connection suck donkey balls for gaming of any sort. Even if you are a multimillionaire you can't do squat about the atrocious lag since you are up against laws of physics.
You have a point in general - the "trend" amongst the more scheming and greedy software (and many other) companies is definitely towards attempting to exact rent and ultimately to recreate the ole landed gentry/peasants dynamics.
But on the other hand with platforms using web-browsers as primary interface which allow applications based on HTML5/JavaScript - which are fully open standards - we do have Linux/Apache/Postgress/what-not available to us where we can make and host these apps, free as in "beer" and "speech" both, completely outside control of any would-be gatekeeper and his "app store".
So its in actuality a browser based system (as long as its APIs are completely open) that is far less likely to become a hostage-taking platform then any other system which requires - say - a specially licensed SDK or a signing certificate from its lord and master, since there is nothing whatsoever stopping you from making and running your own app-hosting server.
It seems many of you don't know (as did I until not so long ago) that Parallels, the virtualization folks of Mac fame, also do "Parallels Bare Metal" which is essentially a direct attack on VMWare's lunch money.
The Parallels Bare Metal 4 is near VMWare ESX 2.x functionality or so but the new Parallels Bare Metal 5 (which is now in beta) has pretty much most of the VMWare 3.x-4.x ESX/vSphere series features. Although it is much more command-line centric - which is good for some of us - and the procedures for converting physical and virtual machines from other vendors are quite different - which you simply have to learn and get used to (yes you can convert ESX/vSphere crap on-disk and via Parallels "importer" in-guest agent).
The thing comes with Windows, OSX and Linux management consoles ala the VMWare editions of old.
So for all of you out there who need to appease corporate demons with a commercial product with proper support arrangements etc, take a look.
I was quite pleasantly surprised and I am holding back any moves to vSphere 5 for many of my clients with the aim of deploying Parallels instead.
Oh and pricing: $499 per-host (no idiotic per-core or per-ram or per-disk nonsense here) for "Small Business" (which has everything you need really, even for big shops since you can script everything using their command line tools) or $999 for their "Standard" which comes with a wacky centralized automation/web-interface/event-ticket/delegation/who-knows-what-else management gizmo.
See those numbers and weep, oh vSphere 5 victims!
They also have a "Virtuozo" product that seems aimed at the VPS rental market.
Err ... No. Even Wikipedia (never a reliable source at the best of times and despite vigorous editing by various apologists) still retains links to various surveys.
It doesn't work that way. The credit for all war casualties is ultimately at the door of whomever started the war. That is why blame for all casualties of WWII rests firmly on the members of the Axis, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in particular.
That is why Hitler was so desperate to create an illusion of being attacked by Poland.
That is also why all casualties in Iraq are hanging around the neck of the "coalition of the willing" and its chief warmonger - USA - in particular.
There is indeed a secondary factor, that of "high moral ground" which usually speaks to utter hypocrisy of those who claim to be the "shining city on the hill" and who pretend to follow laws and care for human rights, all the while engaging in systematic thuggery of the vilest kind - the US being foremost amongst such nations - but that is another issue altogether.
Your claim was that Iraq casualties were, quote: "far far far lower than in any prior war that I can think of" (emphasis mine).
I pointed out several cases off the top of my head, which shows that either you were completely ignorant or (a far more likely scenario given your reply) that you engaged in a very popular amongst US denizens sport of revisionist history to justify the wholly unjustifiable actions of the US Empire.
Iraq affair alone had around a million of civilian casualties by various credible estimates, about 80000 of which were directly confirmed. Plus about 2.5 million refugees.
Unless you mean World Wars I and II or or one of the Japanese Imperial or US Imperial Conquests, a typical conflict in the 19th century had less then 100,000 casualties on both sides, vast majority of them soldiers. 20th century conflicts, such as the Spanish Civil War where Hitler's forces (yes, we are talking genuine swastika-totting Nazis here) engaged on behalf of Franco had around 500,000 casualties (measured in a similar way as those in Iraq) and about 450,000 refugees.
And so on.
With such mendacious, apologist, revisionist bullshit at the very start, any arguments of yours that follow have pretty much zero credibility.
Not only most countries do not have "recall" laws or anything resembling impeachment, but cases when such scandals erupted and the politico in question served his full term laughing at the voters and doing all sorts of damage are aplenty. Hell, in some cases the politician was convicted in the court of law and even then still refused to resign and had to be forcibly booted out of whatever body he was a member in. Not to mention that any legal proceedings against the crook can be successfully stalled for so long that his term is likely to end before the impeachment even gets going properly.
Furthermore, while I keep pointing out proactive measures that empower the electorate, you keep insisting on reactive, post-facto measures that not only dis-empower voters but go against the grain of the whole democracy thing by requiring censorship and other forms of muzzling media, citizens and politicians.
Who, pray tell, gets to decide what is "campaigning" and what is not?! Who decides what actions are in "violation" of the laws?! It is the "authorities", i.e. the members of the government - be it its judicial or executive branches - who do! Next I expect you are going to tell me that they are wholly, impeccably impartial and make such decisions from the purity of their noble hearts, completely focused on the well being of the nation and its denizens in their incorruptible minds ...
So on the one hand we have certainties, i.e. a bona-fide crook being elected when the electorate was dis-enfranchised and forbidden from knowing the truth and on the other hand we have "coulda-woulda-shoulda" voodoo whereby no one can tell what impact what statements had on the elections but the electorate still remains fully empowered to make decisions on whatever information is available, no matter its source or quality. In one corner the nanny-state is "protecting" poor wee idiot voters "from themselves" by denying all of them all information it can lay its paws on and in the other one we have a possibility that some of the voters might be misled by late game chicanery (assuming that none of the counter-measures I described repeatedly are taken).
It is then of little surprise that I believe that empowering voters (at the risk of finding out that some of them are idiots and can't handle uncertain, last minute information) is the democratic thing to do while it is also quite obvious that you find censorship, dubious and highly corruptible "protections" of a nanny-state and general distrust of the choices of voters in favour of a blind trust in the authorities so much more your cup of tea.
That is because, quite contrary to what you believe yourself to be, you are not a proponent of democracy but rather an authoritarian. You find some, select aspects of democracy agreeable only as long as they can be used as part of an unassailable "authority" that you desperately need in your life to make important decisions for you and for others. For their own "good", no doubt.
One cannot help but notice that your "arguments" would have somewhat more impact if only they were grammatical. Or coherent.
As it is however, your above "sentence" makes no sense whatsoever. Nevertheless, I take a liberty of guessing that you wish to accuse me of being "dogmatic", which is quite amusing given my ample explanations for the many reasons behind my statements, which thus prevents them from being "dogmatic".
By definition.
In this, I also took a leap of assuming that you've read the contents of your own link, which might be a bit optimistic on my part.
That assumes (no surprise there) that censorship is the only recourse. Halting (or even cancelling and postponing) elections in such extreme cases never came to your mind, naturally.
How do you think the electorate will feel the morning after when they discover that their choice did in fact happen to be a corrupt crook, only that this information was suppressed and hidden from them by the "authorities" in the name of "fairness"?! Bonus points if the crook-elect is also a personal friend of key members of these "authorities"!
Since your "arguments" have dwindled so completely as to leave you only with an assault on my Slashdot alias as your last remaining desperate ploy, I therefore accept this as your plea for mercy in this dialogue.
Your surrender has been accepted.
That's a laughable set of criteria.
NATO would gobble up Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Mongolia if they could get away with it. "Stability" was never NATO's concern, sticking it to Russia and its allies at all costs, wagging their collective dicks around Middle East and generally trying to provide markets for its top member's military-industrial-complex are the goals of NATO. The utter lie of NATO's original mandate (to oppose the Warsaw Pact) became quite transparent nearly three decades ago.
As to EU, its stability as a whole is quite shaky. I am not sure if you noticed, but even its founding members are in dire straights. See also under: Greece and Portugal.
I grow tired of this. You've got two examples, one in a country that is famous for most of its governments to last less than a month for most of the 20th century. And all of these countries have also other laws, like public financing of campaigns, which truly are responsible for their state of affairs, despite the censorship. I dare you to explain how censorship is, in any way, responsible for their "multiparty coalition" character - not that it actually matters in practice in most of them: they are still ruled by two major parties that control them for most of the last 6 decades, merely that the two majors cannot do it entirely alone ....
Again, I marvel at your smug confidence in the divine powers of the "authorities" and how horribly dissonant it is with your protestations of your defense of ideals of democracy and how well it instead fits an authoritarian mindset that you actually display in your reasoning.
I think I mentioned, just about 20 times now, that communications on the Internet and many, many other modes of transmission can be made anonymously. In which case the "authorities" are unable to determine who transmitted what and for what purpose. "Smearing" oneself and then pointing a finger at the other guy becomes quite viable and effective maneuver, particularly if one acts in collusion with these "authorities". Not to mention camouflaging "smears" as "breaking news" (which is when the "authorities" get to decide on what is and what is not "news"). Etc and so on.
As I keep repeating, censorship, being the very anathema of democracy, always damages its implementation. No matter what convoluted excuse is used to introduce it.
None of this has anything whatsoever to do with censorship. Or "unrestricted freedom" (which is Anarchy btw). Democracy fundamentally depends on free and unrestricted speech and compromising this ability by definition compromi
Curious that you mentioned it: what was the last time in European democracies (barring the unstable former Warsaw Pact countries) when a small party grew in size to win elections? Last I checked such an event was extremely rare and it is the establishment (usually represented by two similarly-flavoured parties - even though they are sometimes called by drastically opposite names) that grows to swallow all else leaving only a perpetual token presence of minor "fringe" parties that never hope to win more than a few seats.
So do you plan to pull the plug on the Internet too? Since it is obvious that it is the only way to enforce such an inane law in the 21st century when "mass media" is in decline and Internet in ascendance...
What about email? Mass SMS messages?
Or do you plan to keep your head in the sand and hope that censorship of some types of media somehow justifies the deeply flawed premise?
How do you fine a foreign blogger who lives out of jurisdiction? Or do your inane laws apply to the whole planet?
All of them are undemocratic, rather obviously. The fact that democracy doesn't outright crumble overnight when such laws are passed to erode it does not constitute an argument for them. But every one of these laws weakens democracy because it takes out of the public discourse controversial ideas which someone, somewhere dislikes and labels "hate". In Canada, for example, "hate speech" laws were successfully used by right-wing groups to muzzle opponents of the Afghanistan military adventure while these same "hate speech" laws could not be used to get a right-wing Jewish extremist to shut up (probably the fact that the "hate speech" court is staffed by people affiliated with Israel had something to do with it). Cases like this are aplenty wherever "hate speech" laws are in effect.
Those are laws that actually help democracy and they are responsible for the smaller parties surviving and these laws, not the censorship idiocy, are responsible for the greater richness of European politics when compared to countries which do not have such laws. Laws like this can only be applauded as they are indeed very democratic in nature.
"Ruling parties changing" alone means nothing.
Do you have an actual argument or is enumeration of imaginary beasts and slang terms for parts of female anatomy the extent of it?
What is there not to compare? UK (and many other Western "democracies") have long since lost their way and became "two-party establishment" systems. In many cases the two parties even have nearly the exact same major agendas. That is why it was possible for a leader of a supposedly "Labour" party to be a champion for worker-dispossessing globalization and an ass-kissing side-kick to a authoritarian war-monger at the helm of a super-power. Examples of the recent decline of the UK and other Western democracies are endless.
And censorship laws to "protect" democracy are just one such.
Which part of "out of jurisdiction" do you not grasp?
Which part of "out of jurisdiction" do you not grasp? Or do you believe that inane UK election laws apply to the whole planet?
So you do believe that UK laws apply to non-UK citizens abroad, throughout the globe. No surprise, really, but it does advance your "credibility" just that one bit further...
Not anymore, Internet is replacing the traditional mass media, Internet that makes such anonymous broadcasts truly cheap and easy. That is why censorship of the Internet is now at the forefront of the self anointed "protectors" of democracy and their "we had to destroy the village to save it" muzzling campaigns.
It has not only been tried (example here), but it has been done so repeatedly all over the UK and no, no one went to prison for it.
Australian and incidentally UK (and many others) democracies have been steadily sliding backwards into autocracy over many decades, evidence of which can be had in pretty much every other headline.
Also, calling someone a "twat" is not exactly a conclusively winning argument in a debate, no matter what your mother told you.
In which case why forbid it? Since it apparently has no effect whatsoever, its just "lies about each other" ... or it has one so profound that the whole democratic process teeters on the edge of collapse and so laws have to be made to "protect" it from this dire danger ....
Pick one. You can't have it both ways, you know.
No, it is you who are incapable of realizing that stopping a "smear campaign" is impossible and that these laws have nothing whatsoever to do with the effort (other then their pretense).
If "smear campaigns" were really the concern, efforts exactly opposite to censorship would be taken: kiosks at polls where last minute replies/appeals of all candidates, free of charge, could be uploaded. A national "elections TV" and "elections radio" channel where very same appeals could be broadcast etc.
Democracy is based on free flow of information and censorship, being the very anathema of democracy, never "helps" or benefits it. Under NO circumstances. NO exceptions.
Anyone who believes that muzzling someone is to "help" democracy has either no clue what democracy is or is an authoritarian who is using the term "democracy" in the same way as the Nazis did: as a mere means to an end - gaining power.
That is the famous "a million flies cannot be wrong" argument. Otherwise known as the argumentum ad potentiam logical fallacy.
And of course it is the "authorities" who get to decide what is a "lie" or "innuendo" or a "false allegation" etc and what mere "reporting", no?
What else can actions of a nanny-state aimed at controlling access to information by the voters be called?
... or else "voters will go into stupor", no? You do realize that you just confirmed the very thing you tried to refute, don't you?
Actually, no. In most Western democracies most politicians are either directly millionaires or are directly backed by billionaires. Furthermore, a typical election budget of a major party runs into hundreds of millions of dollars. Parties themselves are usually multi-hundred-million dollar enterprises. Then there are media moguls who control (unlike the olden days) most major media in the world who are also affiliated with political parties.
In short, it is the very small time passionate candidates who get completely destroyed by these laws (as was intended by the creators of these laws all along).
I tire of repeating myself over and over. Read my other posts in this thread.
I will only give you these hints: advertising has en effect that diminishes with time, so an established party with a huge budget and repeated media recognition (like the current government) will suffer far less then a small party whose tiny budget offered it only a modicum of advertising before the "cooling off" period. By the time the election comes the effect of advertising of smaller players will be nullified.
As to the government being disadvantaged it is laughable. Exactly the opposite happens (that is why the laws were made - by the governments in power) as it affords whomever is controlling the process an opportunity to indirectly harass the other players by either accusing them of "breaking the law" or making exceptions for the ruling elite because of "particularly malicious attacks" etc. And then there is the fact that most media these days are owned by affiliates of one of the major parties or even outright by candidates themselves and media are not exempt from "reporting" on the other, usually "upstart" challengers, who of course have no recourse.
And so on.
Censorship never "helps" democracy. It is in fact the very anathema of it.
If the laws were truly meant to help democracy they would concern themselves with ensuring that smaller players have a level playing field and that all candidates have a chance to make last-second replies. They would ensure that the voters get maximum exposure to information, complete with information kiosks at the polls where all parties could post last minute appeals free of charge so they stay fresh in the voter's minds, etc and so on.
Well, that's true but laws also have to have a modicum of rationality behind them to begin with. And I am pointing out, repeatedly in the face of really pig-headed refusals to accept the obvious, that laws instituting censorship to "help" democracy are like laws instituting mandatory burkas in the effort to "help" self determination of women ...
Particularly when the said "crimes" are wholly made up and if missing even one instance invalidates the whole premise of the law, no?
And I note, again that you failed to explain how censorship (you are calling it an "embargo" now to make it sound less devious) is supposed to help "fairness". I already pointed out a myriad ways in which it helps the electoral process become unfair.
Furthermore, your "arguments" have now devolved into mere swearing. A sure sign of a lost debate.
See above. If they are "insane", they are surely very easy to refute. Which you somehow forgot to do.
What "common good"?! Explain. All I want from you and all the other posters to explain, using reason and logic, how censorship is supposed to serve this "common good". So far no-one has been able to do so. Instead I've heard "reasons" such as "they've made it a law so it must be something", "voters can't vote 'right' if given unauthorized - by the authorities - information", "voters are too stupid to vote unsupervised", "voters will go into stupor if given too much data", "poor downtrodden billionaire candidate B won't be able to reply to evil billionaire candidate A in time", etc.
Not a single logical or reasonable argument as to how these kinds of laws provide for "common good" although it is plain to see how they can greatly advantage certain - particularly major and established in power - groups and how they are thus deeply undemocratic.
Maybe you will be first. Go at it.