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.