According to Constitution, if 20% of the voters sign a petition, there must be general elections that decide if the president stays in power after half of the term.

The goverment is trying everything it can to impede this. A month ago, the national electoral council dismissed the signatures people made because they were "old" (i.e, collected before the half of the term)

If the country doesn't get the referendum elections, this country may go to a civil war. Although it could happen the same if:

-Referendum goes, president loses
- " " wins
-No referendum

This never ends. Now some high ranking military officers in Venezuela have declared themselves on "legal disobedience" or whatever that means.

I am tired on this goverment. There is hate, the country is too divided, it will break itself. I mean in previous goverments it was bad but at least we had peace.

In my first journal, someone asked what i thought about the U.S funding the april 11th coup in my country.

Some months ago, i was browsing Stallman's site and i was mad. He was defending my president (which he does not know) because he said the U.S had funded the coup, cheated on the Florida elections, etc etc.

Anyway, for those of you that have some credible information, comments are welcome.

I have been on the internet since about 1994, when in my state didn't have internet access and the only way was through the local university. A different university had a satellite dish and we had a connection to that university.

Only relatives of professors of our local university had access (though we found our way in, by borrowing accounts)

The access was at 2400 baud, and it was done via telnet. Later it was upgraded to 9600 baud and you could do some graphic browsing via a browser i can't remember its name.

In text mode, you had to send mail to a ftpmail server in order to be able to download a file. I remember i asked for the 2 patchs that were available for Doom ][

Later in 1995, Compuserve came to town (i live in Maracaibo, Venezuela, South America) and it was really slow and difficult to connect. My dad was foolishly scammed by a member and his credit card was stolen.

Later we got an ISP. 28.8kbaud. Fast foward 1997, and i had my own connection, 56k, 5 minutes a day. It growed to an hour a day, and with programs like wingate i could share the connection between my dad and me.

Since december 2000, we have adsl 256kkbits/64kbits. And about from that time, i have a ritual every day of a list of sites i visit. Currently those are, in order:
-Newsforge
-Betanews
-Mandrake.com
-Mandrakeforum.com
-Pclinuxonline.com
-Slipstreamx.net
-Neowin.net
-Slashdot.org

My experience on /. hasn't been really positive. I started as anonymous, then opened an account (i wanted espectro but the letter o was taken). I would find out that every comment i made wasn't read because i posted some hours after the article. Even being a registered user, i was getting all 0 points post. A flaw in the slash code maybe?

I asked taco about it. This is no troll, but i think he either was wasted or he is completely stupid when in email mode. I asked him why all i get would be 0 points posts. He just answered in one line: "post"

I mean WTF is that? Even for a long time, i would not get moderated, either up or down. Not surpringsinly, after about 1-2 weeks after i emailed taco, i would start getting the default 1 point posts, and on my way to finally getting karma: neutral.

Now, i finally got 2 good posts, one modded +3, the other +4, so my karma is positive now.

My only other gripe, is news submission. I have submitted 7 of them, none have been approved. Even one of those 7 was posted about a week later than the date i submitted it.

So, that is my currently experience on /.
My specs: i have 2 pc in my room, a compaq amd 333 64mb laptop that i use the most, with mostly winxp sp1 and vector linux 2.5, and my main amd 2100 xp 256mb ram which has gentoo, winxp and win98

I am 21 and studying computer science down here in the local university.

Probably no one will ever read this, so why bother? I was just bored. Hope you are bored too so you can read this :)

Hasta luego,
Francisco León a.k.a Espectr0