To sum it up in poor words, the point of Gladio was to replace a left-wing government with a fascist one. This was never needed however, because the Italians were good boys and never elected a left-wing government. This notwithstanding, the Italian military secret service supported right-wing terrorism with money, weapons and judiciary protection.

Those countrymen were never aware of such activities, precisely because they were kept secret. In those cases when they become aware of them, the few persons identified as responsible for them had to spend the rest of their lives in South America or Africa to flee from Italian justice.

If we want to be precise, no bombing (or targeted murder) was ever set up by "Gladio". They were carried out by right-wing terrorists that were sponsored by "deviated" Italian secret services. But frankly, counting the victims of the "red" terror versus the ones of the "black" terror seems silly to me (others have done it, and in case you're interested, it's "a draw"). I can assure you that I despise the KGB-sponsored killings as much as the CIA ones. The point of this discussion was that the USA's only interest was a peaceful and boring Europe, and in my opinion terrorism is incompatible with peace and boredom.

Military control would have been an option of last resort, and it was never put in place. However, in certain times we got pretty close to that. It's not surprising, as the rest of southern Europe was not democratic until the 70s, and something like that went on in America's backyard.

It was an emanation of the government of the United States of America, which, as we've already discussed here, is an expression of the private corporations that pay the politicians it's made up of.

It wasn't anti-soviet. It was anti-democratic-countries-of-europe should one of them elect a government that wasn't appreciated by the USA. In this aspect, it was very soviet-like if anything.

About the "right-wingers", I don't know if "immoral manners" is the label that best describes turning hundreds of innocent people into jumbled meat, and then derailing the investigations with the support of the local secret services (very tangible stuff, both the bombs and the evidence that emerged during countless investigations, not conspiracy theory).

Eh, that's what happens when you set up secret organizations to subvert the democratic order of foreign states and end up supporting and funding terrorism. As a side effect, when you get busted, people tend to lose the faith in you.

Your government wants Europe to meet the interests of the companies that rule your country. Whether that means a peaceful, stable, boring place or a fascist, military-controlled, or terrorism-ridden state is of secondary importance.

...I thought that that strategy could be wrong because of innocent victims and extra-judicial executions.

So THAT's what DRM in HTML5 was for...

Yes. In the same way as restricting what people can take away from other people's houses makes everyone more free.

You can't choose not to use DRM once it's required to access most content of the Internet thanks to the fact that Mozilla, too, made it possible.

This is an injustice that is to be ascribed by the perpetrators of DRM: Google, Apple, Adobe, Microsoft. Now Mozilla have joined the club of the culprits.

When a relevant portion of the Internet requires DRM, compiling out DRM support from your browser will only lock you out of the Internet. It's just like Flash. Sites will require it for the silliest reasons and people who can't run it won't be able to access them. Except that now it's worse, because unlike Flash, EME backends cannot be implemented on open source platforms and they will never be made obsolete by some standard technology as HTML5 did with Flash. Basically, Mozilla caved in to the pressure from Google and the other servants of Hollywood to split the web into two unreachable halves. So much for Mozilla's mission of "an open web".

The DRM "plugins" will only be available on OSes where the user isn't allowed to capture screen or audio output when restricted content is being played. That's Windows, OSX and all kinds of NSA-enabled tablets. People using other means to access the Internet will be locked out forever.

No, skilled users will pirate the contents and serve them to the average users in a form that is even more convenient to consume than the DRM-ridden one.

The EME non-standard cannot be supported by open source platforms. It's not a matter of Mozilla "refusing" to support it, it's mathematically impossible for them to support it in a meaningful way. A EME-enabled site implicitly refuses any user running Firefox on Linux. So it's EME itself that robs Firefox of its users, not Mozilla's decision to support it or not.

Even if that were true, it doesn't make those laws any more just. In some places of the world, the vast majority of people believe that gay people should be hanged from a crane in the public square.

Paying for extortion is unethical and illegal too. Laws punish both the extorter and who omits to denounce.

Presumably she was afraid of the fact that the average Gmail user wouldn''t be aware that Google (and Google's unfaithful employees, and hackers, and the NSA, ...) would be able to read his email, and continue to be able to do so for an unspecified amount of time after that mail was "deleted". Which is what actually happens today, but to a much wider extent, with people using the services of Google (Facebook, Bing, ...) without being aware of the massive and uncontrollable espionage that supports them, because the terms of service are explained in EULAs which are effectively not understandable by those users. Banning Gmail would have been unuseful and unjust, I'd have regulated them to explain this policy to the users by using the same font size that they use when they advertise the size of the storage space they're offering, before the user signs the contract.

You mean that Google overrode the people's sovereign will, that they had expressed democratically by electing Liz Figueroa, by corrupting other politicians? If so, it's highly immoral and Google deserves to be punished for this. The government has the monopoly of coercion in modern democracies, and this privilege stems from the fact that it represents the will of the people. Altering this fact is one of the most serious crimes that an entity can stain itself with.

In 2005 my ISP gave me 300 MB of storage which, in a time of 56K modem dialup connections, was plenty. The free offer from the same provider was 100MB, which is still ten times bigger than 10MB.

Did your webmail work like that? The one of my ISP looked like MS Outlook and wasn't bad. Why, AJAX was invented by Microsoft for that exact purpose.

Even Windows 8, with all of Microsoft's economical and political prowess behind it, failed, because UI designers decided to drop the excellent "Windows 95 desktop layout" without having a proper replacement for it (Metro solved a different problem). Microsoft's remedies for this situation have all gone in the direction of restoring elements of the Windows 95 desktop layout.

Perhaps so many people want the "Windows 95 desktop layout" not because they dislike change or are irrational beings. Perhaps they want it because it works, and as is the case for most things that work, perhaps its form follows its function, and this could be the reason why most traditional desktop environments tend to appear similar. Most airplanes look like the same, even though aviation is characterized by strong innovation.

KDE was there before GNOME, and it was even more user friendly, if a bit slower.

And thanks to the LGPL license of GnuTLS, all the users have the possibility to upgrade their systems, independently of whether Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, Apple, Microsoft believe that maintaining those systems is still commercially convenient or not. GPLv3 would be better, as it would give the users the warranty of being able to actually install the updated code into their devices, which is important for non-PCs.

Just some days ago we were already told that the Free Software Community hates Canonical. Then again, who is this Free Software Community? I've been using free software since before it was fashionable to call it thus, so I think that I use lots of software coming from the Free Software Community. Today I happen to use some pieces of free software from Canonical. Of the works by some of the persons spotted in TFA as speakers for the "Free Software Community", I use nothing, so I see more contribution to the Free Software Community from Canonical than from them.

Don't like software form Canonical? Don't use it. They're a commercial company, so they have to break even ultimately. I understand if, after listening to everyone, they make their own decision. Their Mir project is all about Ubuntu phones: should that platform be successful, they'll take the merit, should they fail, the Free Software Community will still have Android as their reference platform. Even if Google is a commercial company, too, and compared to them Canonical is Candy Candy.

No matter how many internet comments you post, you still can't prevent other people from posting their own ones. A badly behaving radio will prevent all other radios working on the same frequency bands from operating correctly. It doesn't take a very powerful radio to cause massive denial of service. Also, a hacked radio could make use of frequencies that its owner hasn't paid to use.