They don't have to give a reason in as much as they are not "preventing" it actively, they are just using some of the operational benefits that they enjoy under their status as an international organization with diplomatic immunity in Chile. The UN does the same thing, there are a number of UN organizations with seats in Chile (Big regional hubs for the ECLAC, UNDP, FAO, etc), and they are exempt from a number of local regulations in Chile, including General Labour Direction oversight. Self-regulation of international organizatons is kinda critical for diplomatic functions, specially for a country like Chile, that has a long tradition of big international organizations operating there... But this is unprecedented. The whole arrangement generally works (and is politically viable in the long run) precisely because these organizations tend to have better working conditions and internal regulation than the (miserable, paltry) ones currently required by Chilean law. Disclaimer: IANAL, but I'm from Chile and worked at the ECLAC/UN there for a couple of years :)

You are right that ( A + C ) > ( B + D ) _|_ A > B, and in that sense your point is well taken: the performance of Linux+OpenGL versus Windows+DirectX does not permit a direct comparison between Linux and Windows _per se_.

But that is _not_ what GP was saying:

"That's 3.8% after Valve improved the OpenGL version using what they'd learned from Linux. It's 20% going from DirectX Windows to OpenGL Linux. That's pretty close to massive, considering the vast amounts of work and money MS has poured into developing DirectX and Windows in general."

Looks like a ( A+C ) > ( B + D ) comparison, especially since he is pointing to the fact that MS develops _both_ windows and directx. ie, the whole stack.

If you want to do task X, and there are to stacks that implement different strategies to acomplish task X, and you have a reasonable benchmark to measure the comparative performance of any of those implementations in solving task X, then why, it makes a lot of sense to throw the two competing implementations, as widely different as they may be, and see who comes up on top.

The reason why it makes sense to compare searching algorithms, for example, it's because you have on objective result that you need to produce, and in those terms compare the actual procedure to see which one was faster/cheaper/prettier in getting _at the same result_.

same thing with game engines: render scene/level, measure fps. If a series of if-then else statements on a cluster of TI calculators ends up being slower, the idiosyncracies of that particular implementation don't do anything against the fact that that particular implementation _sucks_.

Does anybody know if there's a similar thing for Linux? I've been looking for something that would allow the pen-digitizer in my thinkpad tablet work as input for my linux box, but so far have failed at finding anything in that vein.

dude, you are full of it, and clearly have no idea of what the fck you are talking about. To begin, the "crime" about which assange is wanted for questioning is not rape. second, that same conduct is not a crime in the uk, or anywhere outside sweden, for that matter. third, he has not been even formally accused of anything, he is wanted for questioning. fourth, in recent years, and specifically in terms of high profile cases with connections to "national security", sweden has proven that they are willing to extradite people upon requests by the us, cfr the case of the extradition to egypt cited above. the uk has a notorious track record of not extraditing people, unless they are being accused of conducts that are constitutive of crimes in the uk, commited in foreign soil, and even in that case, uk extradition cases are long and difficult. I know, i'm from chile, and i spent 18 months following the minutiae of the pinochet extradition case.

finally, and this is where you show that you are nothing more than a fucking racist redneck bigot, the track record of the us in terms of human rights abuse is of epic proportions, and the one in ecuador is actually pretty timid compared even to other latinamerican countries (which, by the way, have terrible human rights violations records mostly due to military dictatorships in the seventies put in place with support and blesssings from your fucking paragons of democracy the US of A).

so fuck off. everybody knows what this is really about, and you making shit up is not going to change that fact.

you don't have to go that far: it's like having loud sex in your room, and then complaining about privacy when your neighbor complains about the noise

The most obvious analogy is a person having a conversation by the window of his house. I am standing in the street, and can hear his conversation from a public space. I am completely free to listen to it, remember it and then relay it to some other party, take notes of it, record it, and even enter it into a log with other publicly available data like the address, the time and date, and if the person has one of those little nametags in mailboxes, their fucking name.

If i have loud sex in my apartment, i can not say that it is a violation of privacy when my neighbor complains about the noise. I can not complain about him recording it from the privacy of his own home, either.

If the opposite were true, you would have to get permission of everyone that happens to be in hearing range of your phone whenever the phone's microphone is on, like when making a call, or recording an audio note.

If the opposite were true, you would have to get permission from anybody that appears in the background of a picture taken in public space.

"Awareness" on the part of those persons has absolutely nothing to do with it.

This is false. There is no expectation of privacy in public space, if I grab my phone and record sound in the street, and happen to overhear a conversation from inside a house, I do not need authorization from the person having said this conversation.

The opposite would be evidently idiotic.

it is not.

"debts" are any kind of monetary obligation, not only loans. When you buy anything from anyone, you create an obligation to sell, and incur in a debt for the price of the object or service purchased.

There is no additional requirement whatsoever, no requirement of record, interest, promise, manifestation of will, nothing. that can all be implicit, and is the base of contemporary civil law.

"debts" basically mean "any monetary obligation" and that includes pretty much everything, so this whole thread is completely nonsensical.

That only occurs in gnome. the kde keyboard switcher works perfectly in maverick.

Not only have there been prosecutions, but these cases are HUGE in modern criminal law academia, as they touched on fundamental questions of criminal responsibility and legality. They were fundamental in setting the bases of the contemporary discussion about human rights and the criminal persecution of state sponsored acts.

In very simple terms, the problem in terms of criminal theory is that these people committed acts that were not typified as crimes under the legal systems that was in force when they were committed, so their prosecution _and conviction_ had a tremendous impact in the modern understanding of the legality principle, which is a fundamental concept in any criminal law system, and in criminal law theory.

You have a crucial point that you fail to see: those two forms of IP are already distinguished in legal institutions: copyright and patents. the problem, is that both legal institutions are being extended out of control... but the difference is there, and we only need to adjust one (patents) and abolish the other.

But independently of that particular solution, the fact that technological development makes some particular form of social institution or enterprise obsolete is not the problem. If the invention of the wheel made some forms of transportation obsolete, considerations about the preservation or future or pre-wheel forms of transportation should not be valid arguments in discussions about development and deployment of the wheel.

In other words....it doesn't matter. The problem right now is not how are we going to secure that there are incentives for people to invent stuff, but that the mechanisms that we do have in place, that were never created with that intention but also work as incentive structures, are becoming unacceptable threats to the public interest and freedom.

First we need to stop the escalation into police states that the extension of these mechanisms is bringing about, THEN we should let the people that are trying to make money inventing stuff work out how they are going to actually make any.

In other words: the "technological development" argument is moot. it is not going to happen, period. So don't use it to respond to my complaints about my lost freedoms, because i'm being monitored, censored, persecuted, fined and incarcerated NOW, and you want me to worry about the potential profit problem of some corporation in some undefined future. get your priorities right.

As a subsidiary argument, you can reconsider the reasons that were argued in its time for the implementation of IP protection. it was never "let's secure a revenue stream for the author", it was much more a thing of "let's secure the integrity of the produced media for the future, by preventing unauthorized sub-par copies to be made and distributed". That line of thought rests, however, on the direct correlation between cheap copy and low quality copy that digital media makes obsolete.

<quote><p>Open Source is better than all commercial software!!!</p></quote>

Specifically because with open source software, you are able to *see* what is being sent. So yes, obviously it should generate less outrage.

[quote]apt-get remove "package_name" could do it all for you automagically[/quote]

even if that's not easy enough, Ubuntu has a very easy to use graphical package-manager that can do it for you, to the same effect. Checking your email on any OS is harder than installing/removing packages in ubuntu (and most modern linux distros, for that matter)