[Note: I forgot to log in and posted this AC. I'm not sure if reposting as my user is compatible with Slashdot netiquette canon, but this makes it easier to keep track of replies, so pardon the noise.]
Several people have rushed to suggest Moodle as the obvious solution to this problem. I have two distinct and largely independent concerns about such answers.
First and foremost, it is unclear to me that the proper solution to this sort of problem must be a monolithic, integrated and gigantic learning management system. The submitter indeed wonders about specific tools, so suggesting something like Moodle is at least a helpful pointer, yet there isn’t necessarily any indication that a comprehensive tool is the proper solution to the problem. If all that's required is a tool for calculating grades and generating report cards, then the proper solution, following our beloved UNIX philosophy of doing one thing and doing it right, should not be a tool that calculates grades, generates report cards, manages teams, permits file uploads, hosts discussion forums, sends notifications through e-mail, etc, all for any number of courses in which registered users enrol. Such a system could happen to be desirable, of course, but the scope of the question becomes a major concern. The benefits of such a system, if indeed they exist, must of course come when applied to solve problems that fall within the scope of their design: one grand unified system to manage all of the institution's academic information processes.
A greater question is whether such a system is ever a good idea, even when much more is desired than a substitute for spreadsheets. I believe our experience (information technicians as most of us are) with opaque, monolithic systems is quite telling in this regard: it's probably a bad idea, and it's probably better to decouple the bits of the problem as much as possible within the constraints of simplicity imposed by a non-technical user base.
My second concern is more specific and perhaps less important. I’ve had some experience using Moodle itself to manage an undergraduate CS course, and it has been less than pleasant. It certainly takes a stab at a great variety of problems: managing user registration for students and instructors, enrolment in multiple courses, discussion forums, e-mail notifications, student teams, time-limited file uploads for turning in assignments, grading, and so on. Most unsurprisingly, though, its solutions are actually rather poor, at least on the version I happened to work with.
Grades, for whatever reason, are necessarily discrete, simple integers. The student and group information interface does not provide comfortable listings or tables; instead, information is split across multiple pages, one for each student or group, with links to assignments they've turned in and the like. Unfortunately, opening those pages seems to be a stateful action, so if, say, you happen to open the pages for a dozen students in background tabs hoping to download each of their solutions to programming assignments or anything of the sort, by the time the last one loads, the rest are invalidated; you actually have to crawl them one by one. This is only an example, of course, of a pattern present in nearly every function Moodle implements. It's extremely uncomfortable.
Moodle is generally ill-suited for any sort of non-trivial use, and programmatic interaction with it is extremely impractical. Querying its database directly isn't too helpful, as it's full of implementation artefacts and redundant data, and the regular interface relies heavily on the assumption that the user will only ever use it within a Web browser, one page at a time. These concerns may not be too important in the context of a high school whose instructors are unlikely to have the technical skills to try any form of automatic interaction with the system, but the fact that it is even desirable says much of its shortcomings.
I do note that I haven't checked whether the version of Moodle I worked with is up-to-date, and it may well be t
I don't know about junk mail, but perhaps in five years Slashdot spam bots will be smart enough to use "geeky stuff" as something desirable on a website with the motto "news for nerds, stuff that matters", rather than as something that should be abandoned.
While I love to bash on Ubuntu on every (reasonable and merited) opportunity available, and they certainly aren't scarce, this isn't one of them. As others have already pointed out, the packages were removed because Oracle will not license updates, and the latest distributable version has important security vulnerabilities. It would be irresponsible to keep the current packages in the distribution and illegal to update them.
More importantly, this move is exactly what Oracle wants done, and no, it's not any sort of evil move. Dalibor Topic explains in his blog the reasons behind this change in licensing: OpenJDK is (the basis of) the reference implementation for Java 7, and the Sun (now Oracle) JDK implementation is now (going to be) based on OpenJDK; the gratis, non-free licensing for the Sun (now Oracle) JDK was a temporary solution that's reached the end of its applicability:
That non-open-source license was introduced by Sun Microsystems back in 2006, when the open-sourcing of Sun's Java SE implementation was announced at JavaOne, as a stop-gap measure until OpenJDK matured. It was a way to enable Linux distributions to take Sun's JDK 5.0 and provide their own 'native packages' based on Sun's non-open-source bits.
It was always intended to be a temporary solution, and the final solution has always been migrating to OpenJDK. Yeah, it sucks, compatibility is far from complete, and things will break as a result of this move, but it's always been the plan, and it's not Canonical fucking it up this time. For reference, as one of the comments in TFA points out, Debian did it too.
In short: nothing to see here; move along. If this makes you lose sleep, maybe you shouldn't have used Java, and maybe you should migrate to something better.
This story got me thinking that many of the tasks routinely executed on personal computers (perhaps cryptography, video decoding, and such) may benefit from including a FPGA in PCs to serve as a programmable coprocessor. Much like graphics-intensive software can come with shader code to offload processing to the GPU, couldn't a video codec or an implementation of SSL or whatever come with code that would allow an FPGA to do part of the work?
I googled around and found that at least CERN has done something of the sort, but that was over seven years ago. There was a story on Slashdot about something of this sort, but it's even older than the CERN publication. Is anyone working on this sort of idea? If not, why? Is it simply a matter of cost, or is there some other issue that makes this impractical?
This is a great point. The distinction that actually matters is not so much whether the bug reports are submitted by developers or lusers, but whether they're submitted by idiots. The fact that someone's been hired as a developer reduces the odds of idiocy w.r.t. software, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient, and a certain degree of optimism is required to assert even the correlation. Likewise, it's plausible that lusers are more likely than developers to be idiots about software, but exceptions exist.
The real, general solution to this problem is, of course, to get rid of the idiots on both sides. The solution to this problem is left as an exercise for the reader.
Nice of you to mention Plan 9. If you had bothered to read anything at all about it instead of just pasting the first geeky modern OS name you could think of, you'd realize how stupid your comment sounds. Try reading about who made Plan 9, or what its design is like, or who spent decades working on it.
You really need to read this essay about filenames, as well as these two bits about parsing the outputs of ls and ps. In short: correct and secure work with filenames is made difficult by certain features of shells and their default configuration, and the output format of common tools (including ls) makes their output literally impossible to parse in a correct and secure manner. Parsing the output of ps is a very bad idea for similar reasons. It's fine if you're just doing one-liners for simple, everyday interactive work in the shell, but if you write shell scripts and don't understand these issues, you've likely been writing buggy, incorrect, insecure and exploitable code.
I've personally never used PowerShell. My solution to these difficulties has always been to learn to do things properly regardless of the difficulty. While I don't know enough about it to be convinced that it would be a proper solution, I can imagine many ways in which the idea of passing objects instead of text may make things easier. If you can't see why, you need to learn a lot more about shells and their issues. I'm not trying to be patronizing here or anything; it's just that shell scripting is a lot more complex than people typically realize, and such misconceptions cause security holes.
Security people have since forever warned the rest of the world against the risks of blindly trusting centralized/hierarchical trust schemes. It's not the first time this happens. It won't be the last. And while standard practices remain as they currently are, we're all in the hands of whoever's got money and power, and governments tend to have a lot of both. Most of you might not care much about this since you probably live in places with decent governments*, but it's a real concern for an enormous portion of the world's population.
*IN RELATIVE TERMS. I know many of the governments of the "free world" are guilty of all manners of despicable privacy violations with all manners of awful consequences, but please don't even attempt to compare these issues to the sorts of oppression that happen in full-blown totalitarian regimes.
The reasons the coup failed are indeed far closer to what you mentioned than to the silly romantic notion of a massive group of Chavez supporters taking over the Miraflores palace and forcing the new government out (which in turn is about as ridiculous as the idea some Chavez supporters have of the coup having been carried out by hordes of opposition protesters and such; in reality, it was strictly a military matter from start to finish: part of the military carried out the coup, and another part of the military reversed it).
The theory on Wall Street is that Hugo Chavez nationalized the oil fields, replaced its board of directors, and halted the export of oil from Venezuela (in collusion with Saddam Hussein who halted oil production in Iraq at the exact same time).
The problem this theory is that it's simply not how things happened. A three-day strike and halt on production was declared by PDVSA executives and several of its unions against Chavez's various policies regarding the (state-owned yet still supposed to run autonomously) oil company. In response to this, Chavez announced on live national TV the firings of every high-level executive of PDVSA and several other state-owned companies associated to it that also participated in the strike (no big deal, you might think, but it's estimated some 6000 workers were fired in the later months for the sole reason of having taken part in the strike, and many more were later purged after the greater strike of 2002-2003 and when Tascon's list came around). The halt in production was in protest against Chavez and was the cause of the takeover, naturally predating it. Not the other way around.
Lucas Rincon Romero, the highest-ranking general in the history of the modern Venezuelan armed forces (his rank was, in fact, -created- just for him, although I do believe there's another general now with that rank) announces in the first bits of this video* that the high command of the military (the generals in charge of each branch of the military and the minister of defense, IIRC) requested the president's resignation, which, according to him, Chavez accepted. I guess that makes this general a CIA agent or the like, according to your conspiracy theory; why is it, then, that this same general ended up being minister of interior and justice, and is now our ambassador to Portugal?
If you're going to push a conspiracy theory, at least get the right conspiracy. I don't believe in either, but you're simply way off course; sometimes countries do stupid shit without the US being behind it.
* Only one I could find with the whole statement by Lucas Rincon. Ignore the rest of the video if you must.
I would think it's plenty enough to censor stuff (shut down TV channels and radio stations, organize and fund party-associated armed gangs and order them to attack journalists) and act like a dictator (completely politicize every public institution in the country, taking over every power of the state by eliminating all dissent, literally purging thousands of people from public companies and institutions (PDVSA, the entire court system, universities, the central bank...)) to be offended by his policies. There's also the massive amounts of corruption, massive handouts to political allies elsewhere in Latin America (including FARC, of course), incessant warmongering with Colombia (to the point of militarizing the border), economic policy that you wouldn't even laugh at as a joke (7 years and counting of foreign currency exchange restrictions, two year long waiting lists to buy incredibly overpriced cars, monetizing huge amounts of money to fund the military (which has been turned into an arm of the Chavista party)), spiraling urban violence (in 2006 we hit an estimated 160 murders per 100k inhabitants in Caracas!), violent repression of peaceful dissent (watch videos from how just about any opposition march ends!), huge databases of opponents used to purge public institutions of anyone who dares sign a petition for a referendum against Chavez (google for Tascon's list)...
I could literally spend all night typing here. Do ask if you're interested; there's a lot of misinformation going around because Chavez has succeeded in pushing an image of Venezuela being a socialist paradise to left-leaning people all across the world. And it's all bullshit: Chavez has not a bit of socialism in him. His political movement is an authoritarian personalism; it pretends to be nationalism, but the blindly worshipped figure of our nation is whatever Chavez himself whims it to be on any given day/week/month/campaign.
That's the most propagandistic summary I have seen in a while. Chávez has been democratically elected and Venezuela has a freer press than Colombia, Mexico, Pakistan and other US allies, including puppet governments like Iraq and Afghanistan where the US could simply tell the leaders to enact laws and impose freedom of the press by decree. Not only that, TV stations actively collaborated with a coup d'état against Chávez, and instead of rounding up the criminals and sending them to jail or to the firing squad, he left them in place, and waited for the licence of one station to expire.
I've spent the better part of this afternoon commenting here and there in this article and I'm exhausted, so I'll be brief, although I'd certainly prefer to reply more extensively. I don't know anything, to be honest, about the situation regarding press freedoms in Colombia, Pakistan and Mexico. However, it's ridiculous to imply journalism is just fine* and dandy down here.
Furthermore, I'm curious: how, exactly, does a TV station collaborate with a military coup?
* you have to select "Venezuela" in the combo box here to get the listing.
Ever heard of the Ley Habilitante? It's basically special legislative powers given to the president by the legislature. Insta-laws. Dictated, not discussed and voted on. It's been given to Chavez by the 100%* pro-Chavez legislature three times, last I checked. Granted, it's the opposition's own fault for calling for a boycott on the elections that made that legislature. Still damn close to dictatorship, however. They're already (illegally) indefinitely postponing some (largely unimportant) elections, but the real test will be late next year, when the next iteration of legislative elections comes. Stay tuned; it's likely, IMHO, that those elections won't happen. Feel free to place your own bets:)
* with the exception of three lawmakers from a formerly pro-Chavez party, Patria Para Todos (PPT), that is now kinda-sorta-anti-Chavez, sometimes, sometimes not.
Hey, I don't support it. I'm glad they got rid of Zelaya; they saved themselves from having to go through what Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and several others are experiencing. Not only that, but they seem to be doing it right; Zelaya's not back yet, and it doesn't look like he'll be back. It remains to be seen whether this move will backfire come the november elections and end up producing some piece of shit politician that's even worse than Zelaya, but I give them plenty of credit for getting as far as they've gotten. I certainly wish our own military coup down here had been as successful as theirs seems to be.
If your question is why the fuck would Obama be supportive of Zelaya, I don't think it can be denied that it's consistent with his general opposition to the US meddling in regime changes and the like. It'd be counterproductive in terms of his wishes to "restore the US's standing in the world" and such. Politics, politics, politics.
It's funny that you refer to the media like that, since the Chavez government has come rather close to exterminating independent media in this country. The RESORTE law is used for blatant censorship, RCTV (the oldest still existing TV network in this country, dating back to the 50s, and only the second private station) was shut down to silence their strong criticism of Chavez and his movement, and just a few weeks ago 34 radio stations were ordered to stop transmitting over some bullshit bureaucratic issue, and this just happened to include CNB, a widely spread radio network that broadcasts the most popular anti-Chavez political commentary radio/TV show (now off the air, of course, but continues on TV), Alo Ciudadano.
I'm well aware of what US foreign policy towards Latin America was like during the cold war. The cold war is over. Granted, there's no telling what conspiracy theorists will claim, but the coup was evidently a military action, and it's funny to note how Lucas Rincon Romero, the highest-ranking general at the time of the coup who spearheaded it and famously announced Chavez's resignation, ended up being minister of interior and justice and is now the Venezuelan ambassador to Portugal. Funny thing, that.
But I understand your need to deny anything that the US does that could be construed as bad since this might force you to take personal responsibility for your own life.
I'm Venezuelan, just in case you were assuming otherwise. It's quite odd, too, that you believe I see no wrong in anything the US does, seeing as I've implied no such thing; in fact, I hate the US's drug war, I hate US support for Israel, I hate the war in Iraq, I hate almost everything the Republican party represents and a lot of what the Democratic party represents, I hate all of the shenanigans of the Bush administration, and so on and on, ad nauseum. This has absolutely nothing, not a thing, to do with the fact that the coup against Chavez was strictly an action by the Venezuelan military as has always been throughout our long history of coups that dates back about as far as our independence.
Sadly, the idea that Venezuelans are beautiful people with good hearts isn't very accurate. It's certainly one of our traits to be jolly and easy-going and such, but corruption is just as fundamental a trait of our culture as our nicer hobbit bits are. You're spot-on on everything else you said, but you really don't want to be surrounded by venezuelans, at least not in positions of power. For precisely the same nice "taking care of each other" bit, we'll steal from those we count as "others" to provide for "ours". Especially if it means stealing from the state: the more people you're robbing, the less personal it feels.
I noticed something funny when I played RA3. I can't find any screenshots of it, though. You know the little picture of a victorious conscript you're shown when you win a soviet mission? The conscript's face is eerily similar to Chavez's. Perhaps someone here can link to a screenshot.:)
The country that has bought Sukhois, tanks and 100,000 AK-103's, is planning to build a manufacturing plant of Russian rifles, and oppresses peaceful marches
Venezuela's defense spending is just over $2B/year. Their oft-foe, Colombia, spends about $6B/year. And the US spends over $400B/year.
You have a point regarding the US, but it's sort of a silly comparison with Colombia there; they have to deal with FARC, ELN and the various paramilitary groups that fight those two (which, to be fair, have been and possibly continue to be funded by the state in some cases).
And, FYI, your "peaceful marches" involved a freaking coup.
Do you have any idea of how many enormous marches against Chavez there have been in this country in the past ten years? The coup was in 2003 and it was a military action, not a storming of the Miraflores palace by the people. And there've been possibly hundreds of anti-Chavez marches since then. As an aside, it's always good to remind you that Lucas RincÃn Romero, the highest-ranking general at the time, who was very much involved and cooperative with the coup (he's the one who famously announced on national TV the president's resignation was requested, "which he accepted"), ended up becoming Chavez's minister of interior and justice for a while, and he's now our ambassador to Portugal. Yeah, the guy at the head of that coup. Just sayin'.
Just today the AFP released a report showing Caracas as the second most violent city on the planet -- even more violent than Baghdad.
Didn't bother to mention that New Orleans came in right after Caracas, with only one less murder per 100,000 people, did you? Or that Caracas's murder rate fell dramatically since their last survey. Skew much?
Careful with those numbers; they might be based on official murder statistics, which conveniently filter out a very significant ammount of assassinations carried out by corrupt police officers. Some of our official murder statistics even exclude deaths resulting from gang shootings, since those are, according to our former minister of interior and justice RamÃn Rodriguez ChacÃn, not what the murder statistics are really about. I really wish there was a link on Youtube I could show you with the clip of the interview where he said that.
Inferred? Castro and Marx are quite explicitly two of his role models. He was quite friendly with Saddam back in the day, too, although one might say that was mostly (oil) business. Don't forget about Ahmadinejad, who has quite ample support from Chavez, as has been made explicitly and directly evident with some of Chavez's comments during the recent rounds of Iranian protests.
In this case, it's mostly about pushing out some new ridiculous law as quickly as possible to 1) Please our great leader 2) Distract the opposition from the terrible education law that was just passed. We're a couple weeks away from resuming classes after summer vacations, so they've got to make us forget about that as quickly as possible, lest there's a huge new wave of protests.
Slashdot Mirror
[Note: I forgot to log in and posted this AC. I'm not sure if reposting as my user is compatible with Slashdot netiquette canon, but this makes it easier to keep track of replies, so pardon the noise.] Several people have rushed to suggest Moodle as the obvious solution to this problem. I have two distinct and largely independent concerns about such answers. First and foremost, it is unclear to me that the proper solution to this sort of problem must be a monolithic, integrated and gigantic learning management system. The submitter indeed wonders about specific tools, so suggesting something like Moodle is at least a helpful pointer, yet there isn’t necessarily any indication that a comprehensive tool is the proper solution to the problem. If all that's required is a tool for calculating grades and generating report cards, then the proper solution, following our beloved UNIX philosophy of doing one thing and doing it right, should not be a tool that calculates grades, generates report cards, manages teams, permits file uploads, hosts discussion forums, sends notifications through e-mail, etc, all for any number of courses in which registered users enrol. Such a system could happen to be desirable, of course, but the scope of the question becomes a major concern. The benefits of such a system, if indeed they exist, must of course come when applied to solve problems that fall within the scope of their design: one grand unified system to manage all of the institution's academic information processes. A greater question is whether such a system is ever a good idea, even when much more is desired than a substitute for spreadsheets. I believe our experience (information technicians as most of us are) with opaque, monolithic systems is quite telling in this regard: it's probably a bad idea, and it's probably better to decouple the bits of the problem as much as possible within the constraints of simplicity imposed by a non-technical user base. My second concern is more specific and perhaps less important. I’ve had some experience using Moodle itself to manage an undergraduate CS course, and it has been less than pleasant. It certainly takes a stab at a great variety of problems: managing user registration for students and instructors, enrolment in multiple courses, discussion forums, e-mail notifications, student teams, time-limited file uploads for turning in assignments, grading, and so on. Most unsurprisingly, though, its solutions are actually rather poor, at least on the version I happened to work with. Grades, for whatever reason, are necessarily discrete, simple integers. The student and group information interface does not provide comfortable listings or tables; instead, information is split across multiple pages, one for each student or group, with links to assignments they've turned in and the like. Unfortunately, opening those pages seems to be a stateful action, so if, say, you happen to open the pages for a dozen students in background tabs hoping to download each of their solutions to programming assignments or anything of the sort, by the time the last one loads, the rest are invalidated; you actually have to crawl them one by one. This is only an example, of course, of a pattern present in nearly every function Moodle implements. It's extremely uncomfortable. Moodle is generally ill-suited for any sort of non-trivial use, and programmatic interaction with it is extremely impractical. Querying its database directly isn't too helpful, as it's full of implementation artefacts and redundant data, and the regular interface relies heavily on the assumption that the user will only ever use it within a Web browser, one page at a time. These concerns may not be too important in the context of a high school whose instructors are unlikely to have the technical skills to try any form of automatic interaction with the system, but the fact that it is even desirable says much of its shortcomings. I do note that I haven't checked whether the version of Moodle I worked with is up-to-date, and it may well be t
And the solution, obviously, is not checking at all. Slick.
I don't know about junk mail, but perhaps in five years Slashdot spam bots will be smart enough to use "geeky stuff" as something desirable on a website with the motto "news for nerds, stuff that matters", rather than as something that should be abandoned.
Blame the WTO's puppet organisation the US for this sort of thing, not the EU.
Fixed that for you.
While I love to bash on Ubuntu on every (reasonable and merited) opportunity available, and they certainly aren't scarce, this isn't one of them. As others have already pointed out, the packages were removed because Oracle will not license updates, and the latest distributable version has important security vulnerabilities. It would be irresponsible to keep the current packages in the distribution and illegal to update them.
More importantly, this move is exactly what Oracle wants done, and no, it's not any sort of evil move. Dalibor Topic explains in his blog the reasons behind this change in licensing: OpenJDK is (the basis of) the reference implementation for Java 7, and the Sun (now Oracle) JDK implementation is now (going to be) based on OpenJDK; the gratis, non-free licensing for the Sun (now Oracle) JDK was a temporary solution that's reached the end of its applicability:
It was always intended to be a temporary solution, and the final solution has always been migrating to OpenJDK. Yeah, it sucks, compatibility is far from complete, and things will break as a result of this move, but it's always been the plan, and it's not Canonical fucking it up this time. For reference, as one of the comments in TFA points out, Debian did it too.
In short: nothing to see here; move along. If this makes you lose sleep, maybe you shouldn't have used Java, and maybe you should migrate to something better.
This story got me thinking that many of the tasks routinely executed on personal computers (perhaps cryptography, video decoding, and such) may benefit from including a FPGA in PCs to serve as a programmable coprocessor. Much like graphics-intensive software can come with shader code to offload processing to the GPU, couldn't a video codec or an implementation of SSL or whatever come with code that would allow an FPGA to do part of the work?
I googled around and found that at least CERN has done something of the sort, but that was over seven years ago. There was a story on Slashdot about something of this sort, but it's even older than the CERN publication. Is anyone working on this sort of idea? If not, why? Is it simply a matter of cost, or is there some other issue that makes this impractical?
Maybe I just suck at googling...
This is a great point. The distinction that actually matters is not so much whether the bug reports are submitted by developers or lusers, but whether they're submitted by idiots. The fact that someone's been hired as a developer reduces the odds of idiocy w.r.t. software, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient, and a certain degree of optimism is required to assert even the correlation. Likewise, it's plausible that lusers are more likely than developers to be idiots about software, but exceptions exist.
The real, general solution to this problem is, of course, to get rid of the idiots on both sides. The solution to this problem is left as an exercise for the reader.
I completely agree with your general sentiment, but dude, gedit? Seriously? Why not vim or emacs (or both, to avoid the ridiculous flame war)?
Nice of you to mention Plan 9. If you had bothered to read anything at all about it instead of just pasting the first geeky modern OS name you could think of, you'd realize how stupid your comment sounds. Try reading about who made Plan 9, or what its design is like, or who spent decades working on it.
Hydrogen bombs include fusion. That's what the hydrogen does, and it's also why they're sometimes called "fusion bombs".
You really need to read this essay about filenames, as well as these two bits about parsing the outputs of ls and ps. In short: correct and secure work with filenames is made difficult by certain features of shells and their default configuration, and the output format of common tools (including ls) makes their output literally impossible to parse in a correct and secure manner. Parsing the output of ps is a very bad idea for similar reasons. It's fine if you're just doing one-liners for simple, everyday interactive work in the shell, but if you write shell scripts and don't understand these issues, you've likely been writing buggy, incorrect, insecure and exploitable code.
I've personally never used PowerShell. My solution to these difficulties has always been to learn to do things properly regardless of the difficulty. While I don't know enough about it to be convinced that it would be a proper solution, I can imagine many ways in which the idea of passing objects instead of text may make things easier. If you can't see why, you need to learn a lot more about shells and their issues. I'm not trying to be patronizing here or anything; it's just that shell scripting is a lot more complex than people typically realize, and such misconceptions cause security holes.
Security people have since forever warned the rest of the world against the risks of blindly trusting centralized/hierarchical trust schemes. It's not the first time this happens. It won't be the last. And while standard practices remain as they currently are, we're all in the hands of whoever's got money and power, and governments tend to have a lot of both. Most of you might not care much about this since you probably live in places with decent governments*, but it's a real concern for an enormous portion of the world's population.
*IN RELATIVE TERMS. I know many of the governments of the "free world" are guilty of all manners of despicable privacy violations with all manners of awful consequences, but please don't even attempt to compare these issues to the sorts of oppression that happen in full-blown totalitarian regimes.
The theory on Wall Street is that Hugo Chavez nationalized the oil fields, replaced its board of directors, and halted the export of oil from Venezuela (in collusion with Saddam Hussein who halted oil production in Iraq at the exact same time).
The problem this theory is that it's simply not how things happened. A three-day strike and halt on production was declared by PDVSA executives and several of its unions against Chavez's various policies regarding the (state-owned yet still supposed to run autonomously) oil company. In response to this, Chavez announced on live national TV the firings of every high-level executive of PDVSA and several other state-owned companies associated to it that also participated in the strike (no big deal, you might think, but it's estimated some 6000 workers were fired in the later months for the sole reason of having taken part in the strike, and many more were later purged after the greater strike of 2002-2003 and when Tascon's list came around). The halt in production was in protest against Chavez and was the cause of the takeover, naturally predating it. Not the other way around.
Lucas Rincon Romero, the highest-ranking general in the history of the modern Venezuelan armed forces (his rank was, in fact, -created- just for him, although I do believe there's another general now with that rank) announces in the first bits of this video* that the high command of the military (the generals in charge of each branch of the military and the minister of defense, IIRC) requested the president's resignation, which, according to him, Chavez accepted. I guess that makes this general a CIA agent or the like, according to your conspiracy theory; why is it, then, that this same general ended up being minister of interior and justice, and is now our ambassador to Portugal?
If you're going to push a conspiracy theory, at least get the right conspiracy. I don't believe in either, but you're simply way off course; sometimes countries do stupid shit without the US being behind it.
* Only one I could find with the whole statement by Lucas Rincon. Ignore the rest of the video if you must.
I would think it's plenty enough to censor stuff (shut down TV channels and radio stations, organize and fund party-associated armed gangs and order them to attack journalists) and act like a dictator (completely politicize every public institution in the country, taking over every power of the state by eliminating all dissent, literally purging thousands of people from public companies and institutions (PDVSA, the entire court system, universities, the central bank...)) to be offended by his policies. There's also the massive amounts of corruption, massive handouts to political allies elsewhere in Latin America (including FARC, of course), incessant warmongering with Colombia (to the point of militarizing the border), economic policy that you wouldn't even laugh at as a joke (7 years and counting of foreign currency exchange restrictions, two year long waiting lists to buy incredibly overpriced cars, monetizing huge amounts of money to fund the military (which has been turned into an arm of the Chavista party)), spiraling urban violence (in 2006 we hit an estimated 160 murders per 100k inhabitants in Caracas!), violent repression of peaceful dissent (watch videos from how just about any opposition march ends!), huge databases of opponents used to purge public institutions of anyone who dares sign a petition for a referendum against Chavez (google for Tascon's list)...
I could literally spend all night typing here. Do ask if you're interested; there's a lot of misinformation going around because Chavez has succeeded in pushing an image of Venezuela being a socialist paradise to left-leaning people all across the world. And it's all bullshit: Chavez has not a bit of socialism in him. His political movement is an authoritarian personalism; it pretends to be nationalism, but the blindly worshipped figure of our nation is whatever Chavez himself whims it to be on any given day/week/month/campaign.
That's the most propagandistic summary I have seen in a while. Chávez has been democratically elected and Venezuela has a freer press than Colombia, Mexico, Pakistan and other US allies, including puppet governments like Iraq and Afghanistan where the US could simply tell the leaders to enact laws and impose freedom of the press by decree. Not only that, TV stations actively collaborated with a coup d'état against Chávez, and instead of rounding up the criminals and sending them to jail or to the firing squad, he left them in place, and waited for the licence of one station to expire.
I've spent the better part of this afternoon commenting here and there in this article and I'm exhausted, so I'll be brief, although I'd certainly prefer to reply more extensively.
I don't know anything, to be honest, about the situation regarding press freedoms in Colombia, Pakistan and Mexico. However, it's ridiculous to imply journalism is just fine* and dandy down here.
Furthermore, I'm curious: how, exactly, does a TV station collaborate with a military coup?
* you have to select "Venezuela" in the combo box here to get the listing.
Ever heard of the Ley Habilitante? It's basically special legislative powers given to the president by the legislature. Insta-laws. Dictated, not discussed and voted on. It's been given to Chavez by the 100%* pro-Chavez legislature three times, last I checked. Granted, it's the opposition's own fault for calling for a boycott on the elections that made that legislature. Still damn close to dictatorship, however. They're already (illegally) indefinitely postponing some (largely unimportant) elections, but the real test will be late next year, when the next iteration of legislative elections comes. Stay tuned; it's likely, IMHO, that those elections won't happen. Feel free to place your own bets :)
* with the exception of three lawmakers from a formerly pro-Chavez party, Patria Para Todos (PPT), that is now kinda-sorta-anti-Chavez, sometimes, sometimes not.
Hey, I don't support it. I'm glad they got rid of Zelaya; they saved themselves from having to go through what Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and several others are experiencing. Not only that, but they seem to be doing it right; Zelaya's not back yet, and it doesn't look like he'll be back. It remains to be seen whether this move will backfire come the november elections and end up producing some piece of shit politician that's even worse than Zelaya, but I give them plenty of credit for getting as far as they've gotten. I certainly wish our own military coup down here had been as successful as theirs seems to be.
If your question is why the fuck would Obama be supportive of Zelaya, I don't think it can be denied that it's consistent with his general opposition to the US meddling in regime changes and the like. It'd be counterproductive in terms of his wishes to "restore the US's standing in the world" and such. Politics, politics, politics.
I'm well aware of what US foreign policy towards Latin America was like during the cold war. The cold war is over. Granted, there's no telling what conspiracy theorists will claim, but the coup was evidently a military action, and it's funny to note how Lucas Rincon Romero, the highest-ranking general at the time of the coup who spearheaded it and famously announced Chavez's resignation, ended up being minister of interior and justice and is now the Venezuelan ambassador to Portugal. Funny thing, that.
But I understand your need to deny anything that the US does that could be construed as bad since this might force you to take personal responsibility for your own life.
I'm Venezuelan, just in case you were assuming otherwise. It's quite odd, too, that you believe I see no wrong in anything the US does, seeing as I've implied no such thing; in fact, I hate the US's drug war, I hate US support for Israel, I hate the war in Iraq, I hate almost everything the Republican party represents and a lot of what the Democratic party represents, I hate all of the shenanigans of the Bush administration, and so on and on, ad nauseum. This has absolutely nothing, not a thing, to do with the fact that the coup against Chavez was strictly an action by the Venezuelan military as has always been throughout our long history of coups that dates back about as far as our independence.
Sadly, the idea that Venezuelans are beautiful people with good hearts isn't very accurate. It's certainly one of our traits to be jolly and easy-going and such, but corruption is just as fundamental a trait of our culture as our nicer hobbit bits are. You're spot-on on everything else you said, but you really don't want to be surrounded by venezuelans, at least not in positions of power. For precisely the same nice "taking care of each other" bit, we'll steal from those we count as "others" to provide for "ours". Especially if it means stealing from the state: the more people you're robbing, the less personal it feels.
I noticed something funny when I played RA3. I can't find any screenshots of it, though. You know the little picture of a victorious conscript you're shown when you win a soviet mission? The conscript's face is eerily similar to Chavez's. Perhaps someone here can link to a screenshot. :)
The country that has bought Sukhois, tanks and 100,000 AK-103's, is planning to build a manufacturing plant of Russian rifles, and oppresses peaceful marches
Venezuela's defense spending is just over $2B/year. Their oft-foe, Colombia, spends about $6B/year. And the US spends over $400B/year.
You have a point regarding the US, but it's sort of a silly comparison with Colombia there; they have to deal with FARC, ELN and the various paramilitary groups that fight those two (which, to be fair, have been and possibly continue to be funded by the state in some cases).
And, FYI, your "peaceful marches" involved a freaking coup.
Do you have any idea of how many enormous marches against Chavez there have been in this country in the past ten years? The coup was in 2003 and it was a military action, not a storming of the Miraflores palace by the people. And there've been possibly hundreds of anti-Chavez marches since then.
As an aside, it's always good to remind you that Lucas RincÃn Romero, the highest-ranking general at the time, who was very much involved and cooperative with the coup (he's the one who famously announced on national TV the president's resignation was requested, "which he accepted"), ended up becoming Chavez's minister of interior and justice for a while, and he's now our ambassador to Portugal. Yeah, the guy at the head of that coup. Just sayin'.
Just today the AFP released a report showing Caracas as the second most violent city on the planet -- even more violent than Baghdad.
Didn't bother to mention that New Orleans came in right after Caracas, with only one less murder per 100,000 people, did you? Or that Caracas's murder rate fell dramatically since their last survey. Skew much?
Careful with those numbers; they might be based on official murder statistics, which conveniently filter out a very significant ammount of assassinations carried out by corrupt police officers. Some of our official murder statistics even exclude deaths resulting from gang shootings, since those are, according to our former minister of interior and justice RamÃn Rodriguez ChacÃn, not what the murder statistics are really about. I really wish there was a link on Youtube I could show you with the clip of the interview where he said that.
Inferred? Castro and Marx are quite explicitly two of his role models. He was quite friendly with Saddam back in the day, too, although one might say that was mostly (oil) business. Don't forget about Ahmadinejad, who has quite ample support from Chavez, as has been made explicitly and directly evident with some of Chavez's comments during the recent rounds of Iranian protests.
In this case, it's mostly about pushing out some new ridiculous law as quickly as possible to
1) Please our great leader
2) Distract the opposition from the terrible education law that was just passed. We're a couple weeks away from resuming classes after summer vacations, so they've got to make us forget about that as quickly as possible, lest there's a huge new wave of protests.
My GF's 44 years old
There's your problem! And you thought Quake was to blame?