They didn't had the power to do it, and again, how would "the media" (at that time)react to such an act of ilegality like that, there was no such law to forbid such a merger. And the crusade was an irony. It's to state that unless what's written on that law it's properly interpreted, we could be guessing all day and making shit up all year and never get to the bottom of it.
You realize you're not making any sense, do you? The same goverment that was powerless to do anything about the mighty Clarin allowed a massive media merger just to decide it was "powerful enough" to attack them just two years later?
Please. Give me a break. Look up the definition of "monopoly" while you're at it, and you'll soon find out this is nothing more than a powerplay between two former allies. It has nothing to do with "monopolies", or the terrorist state of the 1970s.
Sorry, you're heavily misinformed, the birth of the idea for the media law reform happened in 1983, right after Argentina regained its democracy. It was never brought to the Senate because the government of the season was in tight relationship with the local media giant, Clarin.
Could you please point me to the senate discussions for this new law in the 80s? Because AFAIK this law project was pushed by office and passed in 2009. And in an unusually brief timespan. I still remember congress members asked for the law to be passed "without changing a coma". Isn't that making a mockery of what the congress is supposed to?
You're missing the point here. If you think the government is on a crusade to hurt Clarin because of its "terrorist state" affiliations i suggest you ask yourself why Nestor Kirchner itself allowed the merger between Clarin and Cablevision in the first place, for example. He signed the approval himself. This government was in bed with this conglomerate way before this law was passed.
But even the i question the way, not the why. I don't like Clarin, but i don't approve the way the government seems to hellbent in hurting a so called enemy. Did you notice we keep hearing about this "media monopoly", but not a single official accusation was done? Where's the beef?
And if the issue is attacking "terrorist state pay for what they did", i suggest you write to you senators and ask them why do we still have IVA (VAT, for an US equivalent) on basic goods. That is also a law from the 70's, just in case you weren't aware of that.
The pages you quoted cite information sourced by the IMF. Argentina, being currently an IMF member, provides it with statistics and indicators directly through the INDEC itself. It's its function, after all.
Check out Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru, Chile and even Brazil, right on the same link you provided, for South American examples of countries with a comparable (or greater!) GDP growth than Argentina.
I suggest you dig a bit deeper. The official inflation in Argentina is around 12% anually, which is a number computed by the INDEC (Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Censos, or National Institue of Statistics and Census). This organism is under official intervention since 2007, and it hasn't been providing accurate indicators since then. Actual inflation rates in Argentina are around 25%, which indeed is a tad under Venezuela.
I know this sounds ludicrous, but it is the truth. It's gotten so bad that any consultants publishing inflation indexes that differs from the official ones provided by the INDEC are being forced to pay fees for "confusing the population". This people then resorted to publish their numbers through congress members, who act as a proxy: http://en.mercopress.com/2011/08/09/argentina-s-congress-inflation-index-for-july-1.62-doubles-the-official-rate . You could also browse some other INDEC indexes (http://www.indec.mecon.ar/, sadly only in Spanish) which are way even worse. This organism claims that a typical family of four is above poverty with 1600 Argentinian pesos per month, or roughly 380 dollars. To put that in perspective, a moderate trip to the supermarket here can set you back between 50 and 70 dollars.
Argentina isn't doing well. The economic growth indexes are indeed impressive, but are tied solely to the international increase of soy prices. In more ways than one we (and most of South America for that matter) were extremely lucky. There's no real growth - industrial occupation is roughly the same as 10 years ago, for example. The economy works due to a mix of public subsidies and strong push of middle-class consumption - for example, the government funds (literally) plans to buy LCDs and other appliances on 50 installments. No, that's not a typo. The best way to buy a new TV in Argentina is to be in debt with a bank for 4 years: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&sl=es&tl=en&twu=1&u=http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1261524-los-secretos-de-las-50-cuotas-sin-interes
Don't be fooled by the GDP growth indexes in Argentina. They're more or less on par with the rest of South America. Meanwhile Argentina is perhaps the only country in the world where people buy appliances in installments and houses with cash.
I liked "Inception" a lot. Very well crafted and with a solid story (once you accept the main premise of the film, that is:). For some reason it's become popular to bash the movie while it's been by far one of the best productions of 2010.
I know how you feel, but don't diss "new" authors just like that. I know i'd never discovered the work of Connie Willis if it weren't for her Hugo nominations back in the day.
Then again, SF nowadays is nothing like the ACC era. Sadly enough.
The only reason you got modded up it's because you sounded interesting. Don't take advantage of people now knowing about Argentina to get karma.. =)
Ok, now you're being a moron. It's a law with over 150 new articles which was written and passed in a never-seen-before hurry. Some of it is good. Some is not. And some is (as i explained) tailored to hurt a so-called enemy of the government. Feel free to raise your points to the Supreme Court which found such articles unconstitutional in the first place.
I do recognize the adoption is, at the least, irregular, in the sense there're a lot of black holes in the procedure and legal documentation from the day. Jumping from *that* to an accusation of expropriation during the a military dictatorship its a stretch, to say the least. A stretch your government (and you, from what i gather) had no hesitations to make. But hey, i guess it gives you a lovely reason to make an enemy out of someone you don't like. Even when DNA proof proves you wrong two times in a row.
I don't see the world through black-and-white glasses as you do. But then again, i don't troll on forums either.
yeah, that's why the government lost the primary elections... sorry, WON with 50% of the votes. but it's true, this gov'ment makes some very good decitions, followed by unbelievable fuck-ups that leaves you completely baffled. and believe me, nobody is shedding a tear for the poor Grupo Clarín, which makes Fox News look like the fucking BBC...
Neither do i. I have no sympathies for the Clarin group nor its main newspaper, which i've regarded as crap for a long while now. But two wrongs don't make a right, and it just boggles my mind that people embrace clear cases of censorship only because "Clarin is bad". Two wrongs don't add up to a right.
Just writing to point out the parent comment has loads of false information (...)
My information is spot-on accurate, sorry. I agree about the merits of the new media law (it has some), but disregarding it was tailor made to hurt the Clarin group is naive, at best. The congress is supposed to be made up mostly by lawyers, and they managed to pull a law in a couple of months through both chambers with clearly unconstitutional articles.
Other countries have passed similar legislation regarding media after years of debate, the US included. In Argentina it became a done deal in little over than 3 months.
The bit about Ernestina (the Clarin directive i mentioned) is true as well. I won't deny that the adoption was irregular and should be investigated further, but your government pushed the agenda that her adoptive sons were from disappeared parents during the process. Where's the proof? There was none back then and there's none right now, and this went on for over three years, with constant attacks from "officialist" media. For Gods sake, even the president toyed with this on her countless public speeches.
This is not biased. It's true. It's verifiable. And the sad part is, is not even half of it. Again, the degradation of our political institutions over the past 10 years make me very worried about the future of my country.
The past 8 years on Argentina have been strange, to put it mildly. I've never seen people so polarized about the current administration (and the previous one, which was the current Presidents' husband) in my life. Roughly 50% will approve anything the government does, while the rest will not hesitate to note that we have a very poorly managed economy, the second highest inflation rate in the world, weakened institutions and a new case of official corruption coming to light every other week.
This blockade was due to a court ruling regarding a site called LeakyMails, which supposedly posted hacked mails between government officials. These weren't exactly flattering, to put it mildly. I honestly don't know about the legality of such mails going public (i beleive that all communications between public employees regarding their work should be available to the citizenship), but this is another misstep on an long list of poor decisions. Very poor ones.
For example, the official crusade against "opposing" media is way worse than this - one of Argentinas' main media conglomerates had, over the course of two years:
- One of its main distribution plants for newspaper blocked by trucks affiliated with the transport union (CGT), - One of its main directives harassed for several years under accusations of having its sons being illegally adopted during the last military dictatorship in the 70s. Not a single shred of evidence was ever presented for this, other than suspicious timings- Recent DNA analysis has proven this to be false. - An official ruling which impossibilited the sale of one of their newspapers in the Central Market of Buenos Aires, - Revoked its contract to televise soccer matches, which is now handled directly by the government which pays an astronomic cost each year with taxpayers money. - A new media law passed with shady articles, tailored specifically to hurt this conglomerate. Several of them are currently in hold after being declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
We're living some crazy times down here. The Leakymails fiasco is yet another item in a very long list of poor decisions taken by a government which i feel it will remembered as one of the worse we ever had in a couple of years.
As a fellow Argentinian i can confirm this is a pretty accurate description of the political climate on my country nowadays. This administration (and the previous one) have managed to turn every issue in the country into a small crusade. You're either with us or with the enemy.
I'm pretty worried about how our political institutions have degraded over the past 10 years.
What you're refering to is called skin effect, but it is commonly seen at high frequencies. With 1A at either 50 or 60Hz you're pretty much dead if that much current crosses your heart.
For example, if you're sending $1000 WU charges you about $60, or 6% of your transfer. By the time you add the deposit and withdrawal fees of PayPal you end up with roughly 5%. More often than none costs between PayPal and WU are about the same.
Google Checkout works pretty much the same way as PayPal does, with an account tied up to your Google account. I've used it a couple of times without any issues at all - in fact, they are a little bit less restrictive than PayPal regarding how you can use your credit cards and bank accounts.
What i hate of both Paypal and Google Checkout is that they're both too expensive - between %2 and %2.5 for transactions below $100,000. Which means any operation you perform has a 5% charge from the let go, since these fees applies to both deposits and withdrawals. It doesn't sound like much until you realize this is comparable to what Western Union charges.
Are you serious? I think Java is the only modern language i can think of that forces you to be careful when updating versions. Or porting to different platforms - hell, Perl and Python are, in many ways, much more stable and portable than Java.
This ain't no "corner case" . These guys enabled broken optimizations that break loops, knowingly... in a production release. I completely agree with the parent poster, this is way irresponsible of Oracle. It's akin to releasing a new car model where the steering wheel doesn't work properly.
You're thinking Arduino. If performance is a concern you can try the Arduino-compatible ChipKIT 32 from Digilent, which is an Arduino-compatible device using a more powerful PIC microcontroller.
Slashdot Mirror
They didn't had the power to do it, and again, how would "the media" (at that time)react to such an act of ilegality like that, there was no such law to forbid such a merger. And the crusade was an irony. It's to state that unless what's written on that law it's properly interpreted, we could be guessing all day and making shit up all year and never get to the bottom of it.
You realize you're not making any sense, do you? The same goverment that was powerless to do anything about the mighty Clarin allowed a massive media merger just to decide it was "powerful enough" to attack them just two years later?
Please. Give me a break. Look up the definition of "monopoly" while you're at it, and you'll soon find out this is nothing more than a powerplay between two former allies. It has nothing to do with "monopolies", or the terrorist state of the 1970s.
Sorry, you're heavily misinformed, the birth of the idea for the media law reform happened in 1983, right after Argentina regained its democracy. It was never brought to the Senate because the government of the season was in tight relationship with the local media giant, Clarin.
Could you please point me to the senate discussions for this new law in the 80s? Because AFAIK this law project was pushed by office and passed in 2009. And in an unusually brief timespan. I still remember congress members asked for the law to be passed "without changing a coma". Isn't that making a mockery of what the congress is supposed to?
You're missing the point here. If you think the government is on a crusade to hurt Clarin because of its "terrorist state" affiliations i suggest you ask yourself why Nestor Kirchner itself allowed the merger between Clarin and Cablevision in the first place, for example. He signed the approval himself. This government was in bed with this conglomerate way before this law was passed.
But even the i question the way, not the why. I don't like Clarin, but i don't approve the way the government seems to hellbent in hurting a so called enemy. Did you notice we keep hearing about this "media monopoly", but not a single official accusation was done? Where's the beef?
And if the issue is attacking "terrorist state pay for what they did", i suggest you write to you senators and ask them why do we still have IVA (VAT, for an US equivalent) on basic goods. That is also a law from the 70's, just in case you weren't aware of that.
The pages you quoted cite information sourced by the IMF. Argentina, being currently an IMF member, provides it with statistics and indicators directly through the INDEC itself. It's its function, after all.
Check out Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru, Chile and even Brazil, right on the same link you provided, for South American examples of countries with a comparable (or greater!) GDP growth than Argentina.
Check also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_of_Statistics_and_Census_of_Argentina#Controversy , which is a fairly accurate description of how the INDEC falsifies indexes, basically scamming bearers of Argentinan bonds tied to GDP growth and inflation.
It's sad, but for almost 5 years now my country has no reliable official indicators for anything related to the economy.
I suggest you dig a bit deeper. The official inflation in Argentina is around 12% anually, which is a number computed by the INDEC (Instituto Nacional de Estadistica y Censos, or National Institue of Statistics and Census). This organism is under official intervention since 2007, and it hasn't been providing accurate indicators since then. Actual inflation rates in Argentina are around 25%, which indeed is a tad under Venezuela.
I know this sounds ludicrous, but it is the truth. It's gotten so bad that any consultants publishing inflation indexes that differs from the official ones provided by the INDEC are being forced to pay fees for "confusing the population". This people then resorted to publish their numbers through congress members, who act as a proxy: http://en.mercopress.com/2011/08/09/argentina-s-congress-inflation-index-for-july-1.62-doubles-the-official-rate . You could also browse some other INDEC indexes (http://www.indec.mecon.ar/, sadly only in Spanish) which are way even worse. This organism claims that a typical family of four is above poverty with 1600 Argentinian pesos per month, or roughly 380 dollars. To put that in perspective, a moderate trip to the supermarket here can set you back between 50 and 70 dollars.
Argentina isn't doing well. The economic growth indexes are indeed impressive, but are tied solely to the international increase of soy prices. In more ways than one we (and most of South America for that matter) were extremely lucky. There's no real growth - industrial occupation is roughly the same as 10 years ago, for example. The economy works due to a mix of public subsidies and strong push of middle-class consumption - for example, the government funds (literally) plans to buy LCDs and other appliances on 50 installments. No, that's not a typo. The best way to buy a new TV in Argentina is to be in debt with a bank for 4 years: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&sl=es&tl=en&twu=1&u=http://www.lanacion.com.ar/1261524-los-secretos-de-las-50-cuotas-sin-interes
Don't be fooled by the GDP growth indexes in Argentina. They're more or less on par with the rest of South America. Meanwhile Argentina is perhaps the only country in the world where people buy appliances in installments and houses with cash.
I liked "Inception" a lot. Very well crafted and with a solid story (once you accept the main premise of the film, that is :). For some reason it's become popular to bash the movie while it's been by far one of the best productions of 2010.
"Passages" blew my mind, and is still by far my favorite book by her. I recommend it in case you haven't read it yet.
I know how you feel, but don't diss "new" authors just like that. I know i'd never discovered the work of Connie Willis if it weren't for her Hugo nominations back in the day.
Then again, SF nowadays is nothing like the ACC era. Sadly enough.
The only reason you got modded up it's because you sounded interesting. Don't take advantage of people now knowing about Argentina to get karma.. =)
Ok, now you're being a moron. It's a law with over 150 new articles which was written and passed in a never-seen-before hurry. Some of it is good. Some is not. And some is (as i explained) tailored to hurt a so-called enemy of the government. Feel free to raise your points to the Supreme Court which found such articles unconstitutional in the first place.
I do recognize the adoption is, at the least, irregular, in the sense there're a lot of black holes in the procedure and legal documentation from the day. Jumping from *that* to an accusation of expropriation during the a military dictatorship its a stretch, to say the least. A stretch your government (and you, from what i gather) had no hesitations to make. But hey, i guess it gives you a lovely reason to make an enemy out of someone you don't like. Even when DNA proof proves you wrong two times in a row.
I don't see the world through black-and-white glasses as you do. But then again, i don't troll on forums either.
yeah, that's why the government lost the primary elections... sorry, WON with 50% of the votes. but it's true, this gov'ment makes some very good decitions, followed by unbelievable fuck-ups that leaves you completely baffled. and believe me, nobody is shedding a tear for the poor Grupo Clarín, which makes Fox News look like the fucking BBC...
Neither do i. I have no sympathies for the Clarin group nor its main newspaper, which i've regarded as crap for a long while now. But two wrongs don't make a right, and it just boggles my mind that people embrace clear cases of censorship only because "Clarin is bad". Two wrongs don't add up to a right.
Just writing to point out the parent comment has loads of false information (...)
My information is spot-on accurate, sorry. I agree about the merits of the new media law (it has some), but disregarding it was tailor made to hurt the Clarin group is naive, at best. The congress is supposed to be made up mostly by lawyers, and they managed to pull a law in a couple of months through both chambers with clearly unconstitutional articles.
Other countries have passed similar legislation regarding media after years of debate, the US included. In Argentina it became a done deal in little over than 3 months.
The bit about Ernestina (the Clarin directive i mentioned) is true as well. I won't deny that the adoption was irregular and should be investigated further, but your government pushed the agenda that her adoptive sons were from disappeared parents during the process. Where's the proof? There was none back then and there's none right now, and this went on for over three years, with constant attacks from "officialist" media. For Gods sake, even the president toyed with this on her countless public speeches.
This is not biased. It's true. It's verifiable. And the sad part is, is not even half of it. Again, the degradation of our political institutions over the past 10 years make me very worried about the future of my country.
The past 8 years on Argentina have been strange, to put it mildly. I've never seen people so polarized about the current administration (and the previous one, which was the current Presidents' husband) in my life. Roughly 50% will approve anything the government does, while the rest will not hesitate to note that we have a very poorly managed economy, the second highest inflation rate in the world, weakened institutions and a new case of official corruption coming to light every other week.
This blockade was due to a court ruling regarding a site called LeakyMails, which supposedly posted hacked mails between government officials. These weren't exactly flattering, to put it mildly. I honestly don't know about the legality of such mails going public (i beleive that all communications between public employees regarding their work should be available to the citizenship), but this is another misstep on an long list of poor decisions. Very poor ones.
For example, the official crusade against "opposing" media is way worse than this - one of Argentinas' main media conglomerates had, over the course of two years:
- One of its main distribution plants for newspaper blocked by trucks affiliated with the transport union (CGT),
- One of its main directives harassed for several years under accusations of having its sons being illegally adopted during the last military dictatorship in the 70s. Not a single shred of evidence was ever presented for this, other than suspicious timings- Recent DNA analysis has proven this to be false.
- An official ruling which impossibilited the sale of one of their newspapers in the Central Market of Buenos Aires,
- Revoked its contract to televise soccer matches, which is now handled directly by the government which pays an astronomic cost each year with taxpayers money.
- A new media law passed with shady articles, tailored specifically to hurt this conglomerate. Several of them are currently in hold after being declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.
We're living some crazy times down here. The Leakymails fiasco is yet another item in a very long list of poor decisions taken by a government which i feel it will remembered as one of the worse we ever had in a couple of years.
As a fellow Argentinian i can confirm this is a pretty accurate description of the political climate on my country nowadays. This administration (and the previous one) have managed to turn every issue in the country into a small crusade. You're either with us or with the enemy.
I'm pretty worried about how our political institutions have degraded over the past 10 years.
Am i the only person on earth who actually enjoyed Doom 3? Because i did. A lot.
Am i the only one who cringes when someone mentions "web programming"?
You should ask this guy.
What you're refering to is called skin effect, but it is commonly seen at high frequencies. With 1A at either 50 or 60Hz you're pretty much dead if that much current crosses your heart.
For example, if you're sending $1000 WU charges you about $60, or 6% of your transfer. By the time you add the deposit and withdrawal fees of PayPal you end up with roughly 5%. More often than none costs between PayPal and WU are about the same.
In the immortal words of Homer Simpson: "Aaah, touché"....
Google Checkout works pretty much the same way as PayPal does, with an account tied up to your Google account. I've used it a couple of times without any issues at all - in fact, they are a little bit less restrictive than PayPal regarding how you can use your credit cards and bank accounts.
What i hate of both Paypal and Google Checkout is that they're both too expensive - between %2 and %2.5 for transactions below $100,000. Which means any operation you perform has a 5% charge from the let go, since these fees applies to both deposits and withdrawals. It doesn't sound like much until you realize this is comparable to what Western Union charges.
Python recompiles files to .pyc bytecode dynamically, so you don't even have to care about it. I haven't had any issues migrating code from 2.x to 3.x.
Are you serious? I think Java is the only modern language i can think of that forces you to be careful when updating versions. Or porting to different platforms - hell, Perl and Python are, in many ways, much more stable and portable than Java.
This ain't no "corner case" . These guys enabled broken optimizations that break loops, knowingly... in a production release. I completely agree with the parent poster, this is way irresponsible of Oracle. It's akin to releasing a new car model where the steering wheel doesn't work properly.
You're thinking Arduino. If performance is a concern you can try the Arduino-compatible ChipKIT 32 from Digilent, which is an Arduino-compatible device using a more powerful PIC microcontroller.