Canadian here, here is how I would make sure I was still in power. I would get the voting records of everyone I could, or use analytics to determine the political allegiance.
Then I do this:
Sorry Mr. Democrat, you will need to pay $$$ to find the location of voting stations in your area.
Sorry Mr. Democrat, you will need to pay $$$ to turn off the turdstorm of republican propaganda hitting you every internet page you visit. You can try our "VOTETRUMP" exclusion package.
Sorry Senator Turbostein you have to pay $$$ to reach our customers.
Sorry NPR, you will need to pay $$$ to reach our customers.
Sorry Mr.School, you need to pay $$$ to access book order sites from non-creationist.
HEY THERE MR.LIFELONGREPUBLICAN you will have to pay $$$ access a dissenting opinion of your forever party.
There will be no court with defined rules as to what qualifies a person for a job, there never can be. So companies abusing the H1-B program will list some impossible requirements like " 10 years experience with windows 2012" or "52 years experience with COBOL". They'll claim no US candidate matches and then hire a junior from a cheap labor market, pay him shit and the US gov can't do a thing about it.
Set a minimum wage of 25% above the USA equivalent job....again this is subjective. Sorry, we couldn't find a Phrenological Engineering Specialist, that position doesn't exist in here so we had to create it and we are setting the wage to be 20k a year.
Source: CGI does this in Canada
Want to really mess with the program, make the owner of the visa the employee being hired and don't shackle them to the sponsor....then require mandatory union membership. *POOOOOOF* problem dissapears.
His recommendations are for resolving issues that come up with the existing data collection that Democrats (and replubicans) have already been engaging in for decades. He isn't talking about using his company to divulge personal information about users, but to use existing and accepted practices for mining the data.
That being said, his advice weighs a lot more than the average advisor's. It's like Mike Tyson coaching your son's elementary school boxing program.
Can I make a suggestion? You should create a channel/blog where you apply this to modern advertising, explaining exactly what they are doing with this level cynicism and wit.. Think this guy: https://www.youtube.com/user/A...
Imagine having an army of programmers you barely have to pay? Prisons regularly exchange "resources" depending on what state projects the private prison operators have managed to win/undercut. Adding skilled programmers into the mix will give benefiting companies much better margins than outsourcing to China/India/Eastbloc.
So you have 10gigabit downstream and 1gigabit upstream for a 300 dwelling neighborhood. You could say that 10gigabit pie has to be cut into 300 pieces. In reality there will be a big fat teenager in eating 1/3 of it. Google Fiber and other dedicated bandwidth offerings give you that 1 gigabit all to yourself.
Here's another thought on GMO. There is a business case for genetically modifying a potato to make it as addictive as heroin, grow as big as a watermelon and consume 10x the water a normal potato would need. Why? Because it would make Brand X french fries sell more. Our bodies have no defense against food tampering and the FDA would say nothing because in their eyes it's a potato.
I agree with the sentiment that the term Scientist can mean anything.
I think the big difference now is that industry that spawn from these improved efficiencies are not local. So Kodak employed 130 000 people and instagram 13, what about the people employed by the hardware manufacturers that make Instagram possible? Companies that make phones, wireless equipment, processors, semiconductors....Imagine if all those jobs/business could be created in the economy that lost 130 000 jobs.
China does not recognize the treaties against the ownership of celestial objects and Republicans being Republicans want to squat on the two best pieces. This is as dumb of an idea as you can come up with for human exploration, but at least it's getting space programs some money. Problem is Politicians aren't rocket scientists and have no concept of the work and technology precursors needed for them to claim their pretty marbles. Asteroids and Comets... building material, water and all the precious metals you could ever want. So of course US wants to avoid asteroids. First asteroid you lasso with gold on it and watch all the rich folks wail and howl and scream when their gold value drops to 19th century levels.
China has been mandating their rocket scientists read western Science Fiction for ideas and concepts we take for granted. But they don't even have to bother because Science Fiction is huge China now and is fueling a whole new generation of Science Fiction authors. US better watch out.
1. Has evidence from PRISM been used to indict citizens of the US or its NATO allies.
2. Have any of those accused been denied trial and classed as "enemy combatants"?
3. Do any of the above now reside in Guantanamo Bay ?
If all the above is true then PRISM has already been used in the worst way imaginable. I think you'll find that there are 2 Canadian citizens were held in Guantanemo, with a further 16 candidates for immigration or refugees. That's just Canada, I am sure there are more from other NATO partners. I'd be curious to know who was caught with PRISM or ECHELON?
I've worked as an IT professional on an royalt processing system for the 3 of the biggest labels. The project failed because the royalty processing algorithms needed are so convoluted and the backlog of unprocessed royalties so large that you would need supercomputer level processing to get through it.
Fact #1: Royalty processing systems of today are 25 years old, based on midframe/mainframe technology and would take 3 months to process the monthend of all their artists. What does that mean? They selectively choose what artists they calculate royalties for (read new artists) and shunt the others to their backlog of billions of unpaid royalties. Fact #2: Current system is album based, even a per song sale requires an album in their system, this adds to the complexity. Fact #3: Because they've already collected money for royalty but not processed the artist portion, they are sitting with billions and billions of unpaid royalties...A lot of artists have to sue their own labels for their royalties and the ARTISTS have to prove the royalties were owing. Only then will the label get off its ass, do an emergency processing of royalties for that artist and then pay it out.
Leasing seeds, being unable to replant or risk being sued. GMO companies buy all the seed companies out to prevent farmers from having a choice. Patenting 6000 years of crop variants so they can sue the shit out of you for planting anything but their crops.
Feed billions, sure, but what farms can afford to lease their seeds indefinately? They can't so corporations buy the foreclosed assets and leverage their licensing agreements with GMO companies and cheap migrant labor to flood the market with cheap crop and bankrupt even more farmers. The end result in 10 years you will have farming corporations all planting the same monoculture crops and risk having massive round-up resistant blights.
A couple things you aren't taking into consideration. Bell and Rogers were heavily subsidized by the Canadian government (recall "information super highway") to build national fiber networks. So tax payers have paid for the backbone of our big providers. They have imminent domain rights to property that smaller ISPs will never have, so the CRTC mandated that they allow smaller ISPs to use their last mile access.
Some of the arguments put forth by Bell/Rogers/Shaw is that a small percentage of users were taking up most of the available bandwidth and that it was increasing costs. In reality, it is the practice of basing your required bandwidth to support X number of customers on the lowest bandwidth users, then taking the results and averaging it over a 24 hour period. Divide that number by 10 to get your 10:1 standard telco over-subscription and you get the current bandwidth problem. These bandwidth problems aren't as bad as Bell and Rogers are letting on. Distributed content networks like Akamai allow them to keep streaming the content local. Youtube, Bittorrent and other media sites are the big targets for Bell and Rogers because it allows Canadians to download tons of content without paying a PPV fee. The really big problems stem from the fact that ISP A and ISP B co-locate in the same building yet they do not peer with each other in a non-transit capacity...Along comes US ISP C that both A and B connect to, now if a user from ISP A wants to download data(torrent) from a user on ISP B he has to transit an expensive US carrier.
Now cut to the future, imagine communities being able to communicate via streaming channels on the net without requiring ANY rogers or bell IP TV services. I can be Bob the cabinet maker and have a daily show streamed from my house to a local, regional, national and international community for $40/mo. I can be Jane the concert pianist and I can internet stream one of my performances. I can be the "Next Great Band" and allow people to stream our music or download it without UMG, WMG or BMG ever seeing a dime. There are a thousand different uses for Fiber to the Home level bandwidth and none of them make money for Rogers and Bell....Hence the situation we are in.
Solutions:
- Don't base your capacity planning on the lowest common denominator
- Don't over-subscribe links so much
- Make every Canadian ISP peer with every other Canadian ISP so that if the content exists in Canada there is no need to pay US carrier costs.
- Enable a national multicast backbone and MAKE Rogers and Bell be a part of it.
- Invest in more local content caching
- pay Bram Cohen to add an Autonomous System affinity into bittorrent to have peers local to Canada higher on the desirable seed list. Cost about 500 bucks.
- stop fighting change
Well to show people how green the pastures are on the other side. I spent some time with my brother in Sweden, he moved over there during a student exchange program. He liked it so much he stayed. Why does he like it so much? Well he works for Sony Ericsson as a programmer/engineer and to say they have a different work philosophy is an understatement.
To list some of the perks:
On day 1, out of university, he gets 6 weeks vacation, with the ability to bank another 2. He has 8+2 weeks now.
Overtime, period....law...no such thing as "Salary employee".
You are payed extra to carry a blackberry
By law a person has to be no farther that 10 meters from a natural light source...even in a skyrise. They have a whole classes in architecture schools on this.
Free medicare
Free gym
Free bereavement time no questions asked
6 months PATERNITY leave
free daycare services
Managers and executives that fail employee review are often pushed into no managerial roles.
Sony-Ericsson is considered a slave driving company in Sweden. Google may have won "Best Employer" in the US, but they would be considered McDonald's level in Scandinavia and a lot of the western european countries.
I hear that term a lot "sending our money overseas" or "giving all our money to the middle east"...Thats not quite how it works. US has contracts(not a well kept secret) with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait...etc, that state they will pay X dollar per barrel of oil. In the case of Kuwait I bet its pretty damn low (they would no longer be a country without western intervention).
So how it goes, from my understanding, is this: US companies buy oil at contract for 40/barrel, then sell it to US citizens at 110 barrel...Oil companies see all the profit.
Big oil = republican = current government = high oil prices. US didn't invade Iraq to steal the oil, they invaded Iraq to prevent Saddam from giving it away(oil for food lol) to EU and driving the prices down BELOW contract values..In that case the money does go the middle east.
On topic: I think high oil prices are the greatest thing ever...you can't give away SUVs now. EV hackers get my support, they'll be the auto barons of the future.
Couple things:
Schools, university all have access to network and internet resources (although with the deny everything allow specific mentality). The internet that costs 1/3 of a monthly wage is the tourist internet. EVERYTHING sold to a tourist costs 10-20 times what a cuban pays. The reality is, for Cubans there really isn't any access point outside of the schools. It used to be a lot more lax, until the Cuban government got paranoid because US interests caught trying to stir up things for billionth time. What used to happened is the person working the internet cafe would sell (blackmarket) the leftover time a tourist paid for if he left early. Cubans would hang out outside the tourist cafe waiting for the "nod". Government got wiser to that. Now you are a seeing the latest version of that...People make "requests" to the internet operators and they get what you want. Its mostly music, movies...emails..etc.
In fact they have 2 currencies. They have their tourist dollar(CUC) which trades for USD and they have the cuban peso (CUP) which Cubans use. 1 bottle of 12 year old rum costs Cubans the equivalent of.50 CUC. Cubans are not really allowed to use USD and CUC, so they would never pay the full CUC price a tourist does.
I think Karl Rove quitting, and now the Attorney General is really a distraction away from the disqualification of 5 1/2 million democrat votes for the next election. The district attorneys that Karl Rove put in place were in some key battleground states. When the District Attorney of New Mexico didn't jump on board he was fired (along with 8 others).
This issue has been covered by the BBC, CBS and CBC(google voter caging)...It has not been covered by a major news network in the US. If the republicans can make enough news and diffuse attention from their election system activities then they may have a shot in the race for president.
reference: BBC reporter Greg Palast (www.gregpalast.com), BBCnews.co.uk
I haven't heard much on the voter caging scandal. If anything is an abuse of data mining its the 3 million or so registered voters denied their rights. The Attorney Generals, the resignation of his assistant and now his resignation are probably all smokescreens for the continued practice of challenging minority votes.
US uses the logic "if he is dictator he owns everything in Cuba". Not surprising that a US publication catering to the wealthy elite would use this approach. This is something US media have been spewing for a few years now. The average slashdot reader knows the difference between communism and capitalism. Applying a capitalist approach to a communist country is dumb.
Cuba's response to this:
Not surprisingly, the Cuban government has long disputed Forbes' inclusion of Castro in their list.3 It publicly responded for the first time in 2004 by issuing a statement clarifying that "the revenues of Cuban state companies are used exclusively for the benefit of the people, to whom they belong."4 In 2005, Fidel publicly rebuked Forbes' report and said he was considering a lawsuit against the magazine for libel.
So by your logic George Bush is the richest man in the world...or I should say Dick Cheney is.
Castro built the system, he dosen't walk around and point to 18 year old girls and say "come with me" and they have to. No, it dosen't work that way. Castro believes in Communism because his early adult life showed him that capitalism (owning of property, having people indebted..etc) lead to nothing but misery for Cuba. Cubans were second class citizens in their own country under American rule (everything owned by US companies). Hell, Cuban military had orders to shoot at any United Fruit ships dared to even come close to Cuba. If you don't know who United Fruit was then google it.
The system dictates how Cubans behave, not Castro. when Castro dies, nothing will change unless the system(the people) decide. But a lot of Cubans like feeling safe, like have 100% employment, like having free education/healthcare. The big complaint I ever hear from Cubans is about censoring/controlling of media/information and travel.
Without the US embargo Cuba would probably move towards socialism. The people that are against the lifting of the embargo are the exiled(rich or formely) Cuban families and US trade companies that want to sweep in when Castro dies and "Claim" their family plantations and rule the lowerclasses like their parents/grandparents did. US will back their claims, they'll say Cuba "owes" 50 years of lost revenue and then legally fengshwei a debt to the world bank for said lost revenue...then begin to claim other aspects of Cuba as "debt reclamation". Or some other dumbfuck capitalist scheme like that.
That is why Castro is so strict when it comes to ANYTHING that in his mind may lead to a returning to the way they were; 90% illiteracy and a population enslaved(indebted) to foreign interests. Is it justified?
So ya, to sum: up Castro isn't an asshole dictator like any number of banana republics. He contributes more doctors/medicine to impoverished spanish colonies than anyone in the world. And he also happend to be a good friend of my hero Pierre Trudeau.
Oh, and the banks are really for us tourists/foreign nations. Communists don't need banks.
lol, you do realize Castro's family was rich and was part of the ruling class in Cuba BEFORE the revolution. Same with Che Guevara's. Guess what plantation was the first one given over to the "people" Castro's mother's. Castro gave everything his family owned to the people.
Castro lives in a shack compared to the average upper middle class in the US.
When I say that children will get the best first in Cuba its just a continuation of their philosophy. Schools have better computers than banks in Cuba. If you aren't working you are in school in Cuba. They know its the best defense against being exploited again. You can't exploit a society thats smarter than yours.
What you need to do is assume everything you hear on Fox news is the opposite of how it is in Cuba.
Slashdot Mirror
Canadian here, here is how I would make sure I was still in power. I would get the voting records of everyone I could, or use analytics to determine the political allegiance. Then I do this: Sorry Mr. Democrat, you will need to pay $$$ to find the location of voting stations in your area. Sorry Mr. Democrat, you will need to pay $$$ to turn off the turdstorm of republican propaganda hitting you every internet page you visit. You can try our "VOTETRUMP" exclusion package. Sorry Senator Turbostein you have to pay $$$ to reach our customers. Sorry NPR, you will need to pay $$$ to reach our customers. Sorry Mr.School, you need to pay $$$ to access book order sites from non-creationist. HEY THERE MR.LIFELONGREPUBLICAN you will have to pay $$$ access a dissenting opinion of your forever party.
There will be no court with defined rules as to what qualifies a person for a job, there never can be. So companies abusing the H1-B program will list some impossible requirements like " 10 years experience with windows 2012" or "52 years experience with COBOL". They'll claim no US candidate matches and then hire a junior from a cheap labor market, pay him shit and the US gov can't do a thing about it. Set a minimum wage of 25% above the USA equivalent job....again this is subjective. Sorry, we couldn't find a Phrenological Engineering Specialist, that position doesn't exist in here so we had to create it and we are setting the wage to be 20k a year. Source: CGI does this in Canada Want to really mess with the program, make the owner of the visa the employee being hired and don't shackle them to the sponsor....then require mandatory union membership. *POOOOOOF* problem dissapears.
His recommendations are for resolving issues that come up with the existing data collection that Democrats (and replubicans) have already been engaging in for decades. He isn't talking about using his company to divulge personal information about users, but to use existing and accepted practices for mining the data. That being said, his advice weighs a lot more than the average advisor's. It's like Mike Tyson coaching your son's elementary school boxing program.
Can I make a suggestion? You should create a channel/blog where you apply this to modern advertising, explaining exactly what they are doing with this level cynicism and wit.. Think this guy: https://www.youtube.com/user/A...
Imagine having an army of programmers you barely have to pay? Prisons regularly exchange "resources" depending on what state projects the private prison operators have managed to win/undercut. Adding skilled programmers into the mix will give benefiting companies much better margins than outsourcing to China/India/Eastbloc.
So you have 10gigabit downstream and 1gigabit upstream for a 300 dwelling neighborhood. You could say that 10gigabit pie has to be cut into 300 pieces. In reality there will be a big fat teenager in eating 1/3 of it. Google Fiber and other dedicated bandwidth offerings give you that 1 gigabit all to yourself.
Here's another thought on GMO. There is a business case for genetically modifying a potato to make it as addictive as heroin, grow as big as a watermelon and consume 10x the water a normal potato would need. Why? Because it would make Brand X french fries sell more. Our bodies have no defense against food tampering and the FDA would say nothing because in their eyes it's a potato. I agree with the sentiment that the term Scientist can mean anything.
I think the big difference now is that industry that spawn from these improved efficiencies are not local. So Kodak employed 130 000 people and instagram 13, what about the people employed by the hardware manufacturers that make Instagram possible? Companies that make phones, wireless equipment, processors, semiconductors....Imagine if all those jobs/business could be created in the economy that lost 130 000 jobs.
China does not recognize the treaties against the ownership of celestial objects and Republicans being Republicans want to squat on the two best pieces. This is as dumb of an idea as you can come up with for human exploration, but at least it's getting space programs some money. Problem is Politicians aren't rocket scientists and have no concept of the work and technology precursors needed for them to claim their pretty marbles. Asteroids and Comets... building material, water and all the precious metals you could ever want. So of course US wants to avoid asteroids. First asteroid you lasso with gold on it and watch all the rich folks wail and howl and scream when their gold value drops to 19th century levels. China has been mandating their rocket scientists read western Science Fiction for ideas and concepts we take for granted. But they don't even have to bother because Science Fiction is huge China now and is fueling a whole new generation of Science Fiction authors. US better watch out.
1. Has evidence from PRISM been used to indict citizens of the US or its NATO allies. 2. Have any of those accused been denied trial and classed as "enemy combatants"? 3. Do any of the above now reside in Guantanamo Bay ? If all the above is true then PRISM has already been used in the worst way imaginable. I think you'll find that there are 2 Canadian citizens were held in Guantanemo, with a further 16 candidates for immigration or refugees. That's just Canada, I am sure there are more from other NATO partners. I'd be curious to know who was caught with PRISM or ECHELON?
I've worked as an IT professional on an royalt processing system for the 3 of the biggest labels. The project failed because the royalty processing algorithms needed are so convoluted and the backlog of unprocessed royalties so large that you would need supercomputer level processing to get through it. Fact #1: Royalty processing systems of today are 25 years old, based on midframe/mainframe technology and would take 3 months to process the monthend of all their artists. What does that mean? They selectively choose what artists they calculate royalties for (read new artists) and shunt the others to their backlog of billions of unpaid royalties. Fact #2: Current system is album based, even a per song sale requires an album in their system, this adds to the complexity. Fact #3: Because they've already collected money for royalty but not processed the artist portion, they are sitting with billions and billions of unpaid royalties...A lot of artists have to sue their own labels for their royalties and the ARTISTS have to prove the royalties were owing. Only then will the label get off its ass, do an emergency processing of royalties for that artist and then pay it out.
Leasing seeds, being unable to replant or risk being sued. GMO companies buy all the seed companies out to prevent farmers from having a choice. Patenting 6000 years of crop variants so they can sue the shit out of you for planting anything but their crops.
Feed billions, sure, but what farms can afford to lease their seeds indefinately? They can't so corporations buy the foreclosed assets and leverage their licensing agreements with GMO companies and cheap migrant labor to flood the market with cheap crop and bankrupt even more farmers. The end result in 10 years you will have farming corporations all planting the same monoculture crops and risk having massive round-up resistant blights.
What are they using for switching infrastructure? How are they handling incoming web load distribution?
A couple things you aren't taking into consideration. Bell and Rogers were heavily subsidized by the Canadian government (recall "information super highway") to build national fiber networks. So tax payers have paid for the backbone of our big providers. They have imminent domain rights to property that smaller ISPs will never have, so the CRTC mandated that they allow smaller ISPs to use their last mile access. Some of the arguments put forth by Bell/Rogers/Shaw is that a small percentage of users were taking up most of the available bandwidth and that it was increasing costs. In reality, it is the practice of basing your required bandwidth to support X number of customers on the lowest bandwidth users, then taking the results and averaging it over a 24 hour period. Divide that number by 10 to get your 10:1 standard telco over-subscription and you get the current bandwidth problem. These bandwidth problems aren't as bad as Bell and Rogers are letting on. Distributed content networks like Akamai allow them to keep streaming the content local. Youtube, Bittorrent and other media sites are the big targets for Bell and Rogers because it allows Canadians to download tons of content without paying a PPV fee. The really big problems stem from the fact that ISP A and ISP B co-locate in the same building yet they do not peer with each other in a non-transit capacity...Along comes US ISP C that both A and B connect to, now if a user from ISP A wants to download data(torrent) from a user on ISP B he has to transit an expensive US carrier. Now cut to the future, imagine communities being able to communicate via streaming channels on the net without requiring ANY rogers or bell IP TV services. I can be Bob the cabinet maker and have a daily show streamed from my house to a local, regional, national and international community for $40/mo. I can be Jane the concert pianist and I can internet stream one of my performances. I can be the "Next Great Band" and allow people to stream our music or download it without UMG, WMG or BMG ever seeing a dime. There are a thousand different uses for Fiber to the Home level bandwidth and none of them make money for Rogers and Bell....Hence the situation we are in. Solutions: - Don't base your capacity planning on the lowest common denominator - Don't over-subscribe links so much - Make every Canadian ISP peer with every other Canadian ISP so that if the content exists in Canada there is no need to pay US carrier costs. - Enable a national multicast backbone and MAKE Rogers and Bell be a part of it. - Invest in more local content caching - pay Bram Cohen to add an Autonomous System affinity into bittorrent to have peers local to Canada higher on the desirable seed list. Cost about 500 bucks. - stop fighting change
Well to show people how green the pastures are on the other side. I spent some time with my brother in Sweden, he moved over there during a student exchange program. He liked it so much he stayed. Why does he like it so much? Well he works for Sony Ericsson as a programmer/engineer and to say they have a different work philosophy is an understatement. To list some of the perks: On day 1, out of university, he gets 6 weeks vacation, with the ability to bank another 2. He has 8+2 weeks now. Overtime, period....law...no such thing as "Salary employee". You are payed extra to carry a blackberry By law a person has to be no farther that 10 meters from a natural light source...even in a skyrise. They have a whole classes in architecture schools on this. Free medicare Free gym Free bereavement time no questions asked 6 months PATERNITY leave free daycare services Managers and executives that fail employee review are often pushed into no managerial roles. Sony-Ericsson is considered a slave driving company in Sweden. Google may have won "Best Employer" in the US, but they would be considered McDonald's level in Scandinavia and a lot of the western european countries.
I hear that term a lot "sending our money overseas" or "giving all our money to the middle east"...Thats not quite how it works. US has contracts(not a well kept secret) with Saudi Arabia, Kuwait...etc, that state they will pay X dollar per barrel of oil. In the case of Kuwait I bet its pretty damn low (they would no longer be a country without western intervention). So how it goes, from my understanding, is this: US companies buy oil at contract for 40/barrel, then sell it to US citizens at 110 barrel...Oil companies see all the profit. Big oil = republican = current government = high oil prices. US didn't invade Iraq to steal the oil, they invaded Iraq to prevent Saddam from giving it away(oil for food lol) to EU and driving the prices down BELOW contract values..In that case the money does go the middle east. On topic: I think high oil prices are the greatest thing ever...you can't give away SUVs now. EV hackers get my support, they'll be the auto barons of the future.
http://www.natchezdemocrat.com/news/2007/sep/28/judge-oks-rivera-fraud-suit/ Yup, do people that get scammed by these people not have access to google? That took me 32 seconds to find.
This guy is one of the comic geniuses of our times...We have to pay homage with some appropriate tags. morestuff,7words ....
Couple things: Schools, university all have access to network and internet resources (although with the deny everything allow specific mentality). The internet that costs 1/3 of a monthly wage is the tourist internet. EVERYTHING sold to a tourist costs 10-20 times what a cuban pays. The reality is, for Cubans there really isn't any access point outside of the schools. It used to be a lot more lax, until the Cuban government got paranoid because US interests caught trying to stir up things for billionth time. What used to happened is the person working the internet cafe would sell (blackmarket) the leftover time a tourist paid for if he left early. Cubans would hang out outside the tourist cafe waiting for the "nod". Government got wiser to that. Now you are a seeing the latest version of that...People make "requests" to the internet operators and they get what you want. Its mostly music, movies...emails..etc. In fact they have 2 currencies. They have their tourist dollar(CUC) which trades for USD and they have the cuban peso (CUP) which Cubans use. 1 bottle of 12 year old rum costs Cubans the equivalent of .50 CUC. Cubans are not really allowed to use USD and CUC, so they would never pay the full CUC price a tourist does.
Did he drop any epix?
I think Karl Rove quitting, and now the Attorney General is really a distraction away from the disqualification of 5 1/2 million democrat votes for the next election. The district attorneys that Karl Rove put in place were in some key battleground states. When the District Attorney of New Mexico didn't jump on board he was fired (along with 8 others).
This issue has been covered by the BBC, CBS and CBC(google voter caging)...It has not been covered by a major news network in the US. If the republicans can make enough news and diffuse attention from their election system activities then they may have a shot in the race for president.
reference: BBC reporter Greg Palast (www.gregpalast.com), BBCnews.co.uk
I haven't heard much on the voter caging scandal. If anything is an abuse of data mining its the 3 million or so registered voters denied their rights. The Attorney Generals, the resignation of his assistant and now his resignation are probably all smokescreens for the continued practice of challenging minority votes.
US uses the logic "if he is dictator he owns everything in Cuba". Not surprising that a US publication catering to the wealthy elite would use this approach. This is something US media have been spewing for a few years now. The average slashdot reader knows the difference between communism and capitalism. Applying a capitalist approach to a communist country is dumb. Cuba's response to this: Not surprisingly, the Cuban government has long disputed Forbes' inclusion of Castro in their list.3 It publicly responded for the first time in 2004 by issuing a statement clarifying that "the revenues of Cuban state companies are used exclusively for the benefit of the people, to whom they belong."4 In 2005, Fidel publicly rebuked Forbes' report and said he was considering a lawsuit against the magazine for libel.
So by your logic George Bush is the richest man in the world...or I should say Dick Cheney is.
Castro built the system, he dosen't walk around and point to 18 year old girls and say "come with me" and they have to. No, it dosen't work that way. Castro believes in Communism because his early adult life showed him that capitalism (owning of property, having people indebted..etc) lead to nothing but misery for Cuba. Cubans were second class citizens in their own country under American rule (everything owned by US companies). Hell, Cuban military had orders to shoot at any United Fruit ships dared to even come close to Cuba. If you don't know who United Fruit was then google it.
The system dictates how Cubans behave, not Castro. when Castro dies, nothing will change unless the system(the people) decide. But a lot of Cubans like feeling safe, like have 100% employment, like having free education/healthcare. The big complaint I ever hear from Cubans is about censoring/controlling of media/information and travel.
Without the US embargo Cuba would probably move towards socialism. The people that are against the lifting of the embargo are the exiled(rich or formely) Cuban families and US trade companies that want to sweep in when Castro dies and "Claim" their family plantations and rule the lowerclasses like their parents/grandparents did. US will back their claims, they'll say Cuba "owes" 50 years of lost revenue and then legally fengshwei a debt to the world bank for said lost revenue...then begin to claim other aspects of Cuba as "debt reclamation". Or some other dumbfuck capitalist scheme like that.
That is why Castro is so strict when it comes to ANYTHING that in his mind may lead to a returning to the way they were; 90% illiteracy and a population enslaved(indebted) to foreign interests. Is it justified?
So ya, to sum: up Castro isn't an asshole dictator like any number of banana republics. He contributes more doctors/medicine to impoverished spanish colonies than anyone in the world. And he also happend to be a good friend of my hero Pierre Trudeau.
Oh, and the banks are really for us tourists/foreign nations. Communists don't need banks.
lol, you do realize Castro's family was rich and was part of the ruling class in Cuba BEFORE the revolution. Same with Che Guevara's. Guess what plantation was the first one given over to the "people" Castro's mother's. Castro gave everything his family owned to the people.
Castro lives in a shack compared to the average upper middle class in the US.
When I say that children will get the best first in Cuba its just a continuation of their philosophy. Schools have better computers than banks in Cuba. If you aren't working you are in school in Cuba. They know its the best defense against being exploited again. You can't exploit a society thats smarter than yours.
What you need to do is assume everything you hear on Fox news is the opposite of how it is in Cuba.