Since this is a 0.7 release, I don't expect they have accomplished all the states goals yet, but the progress is promising.
Ah, so everyone who opposes Maduro is a violent fascist, just like everyone who opposes the rule of Kagame in Rwanda is a genocidaire and everyone who opposes Putin turns out to secretly be an agent of anti-Russian overseas powers.
Your "everyone" argument is a strawman as no one suggests that all protests are fascist.
Interesting that 'the Bolivarian Revolution' is taking so long, isn't it? It's almost like the concept of revolution is being used to excuse failures and justify oppressive behaviour on a supposedly 'temporary' but actually permanent basis.
Is it taking long? Poverty has fallen by more than half and extreme poverty by more than two-thirds.
http://venezuelanalysis.com/indicators/2009
Venezuela is also one of 18 countries recognized by the UN for meeting their most stringent anti-hunger targets:
http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/177728/icode/
And for the first time in half a centuary, there is a counter balance to United States hegemony in Latin America. The leaders of Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, and Boliva have all given credit to Chavez and Venezuela for making that possible. In Boliva by the way, there was a US-backed plan to privatize water. To say a counter balance was needed is an understatement.
The legitimacy of a democratic state doesn't just rest on whether elections are held. It also depends on whether there is a genuine space for political debate and opposition. Ruling by edict and refusing to accept that anyone could legitimately oppose 'the Bolivarian Revolution' without being a facist makes any democracy a sham.
Don't kid yourself, the right wing media in Latin America is ruthless and there are media criticisms everyday of the government in Venezuela. And since you think Venezuela is a "sham" democracy, I wonder what you think of the United States? Of course, in the US no one is arrested for protesting and alternatives to the two Wall Street owned politcal parties are given plenty of media coverage.
My understanding is that while Android is open source, Google doesn't accept upstream contributions to the source code. Each time a manufacturer gets the current version of Android to work on their hardware, they need to make some tweaks to the code. Since Google doesn't accept source contributions, as soon as a new version of Android comes out, the hardware manufacturers have to repeat the entire process for the new version, plus make any additional adjustments needed for compatibility with Google's new code.
This puts a lot of unnecessary pressure on hardware manufacturers within a skill-set they don't necessarily want to maintain or excel at (operating system development).
If Google accepted upstream contributions to the source code, then conceivably, when a new version of Android was released, a manufacturer's prior contributions (fixes, etc.) would already be in the code. At least then, the manufacturers wouldn't need to figure out how to re-apply changes they've already made to a prior version of Android.
If anyone has more information on this, and how Google is collaborating (or not collaborating) with the open source community, I'd be very curious to know.
Freedom of speech protects us from infringement from the government, not other people or corporations.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that the line between the government and the corporations has been blurred. In this case in particular, the Senate chairman of homeland security (Joe Lieberman) phoned a corporation and "requested" they stop publishing information critical of the government. Within hours, the corporation complied.
More broadly, corporations are pulling the strings on everything from bailouts to defense department handouts to tax breaks. They contributed a record amount of money to politicians this election cycle and are intent on wielding ever greater political influence. They want to be political actors and in effect already have greater influence on our lives than many elected officials.
We can protect assaults on freedom of speech from the government all we want, but that may give us freedom of speech in name only if corporations clamp down on that speech, either at the behest of the government (as in this case) or by their own actions.
There is something even more twisted about Amazon.com's case -- their entire business model is entirely dependent upon the government and tax payer funding. Without the creation of the Internet, which you & I paid for with our tax dollars, Amazon.com wouldn't even exist. Now that they've benefited from government largess, they are in a position to limit what you and I can access on the very platform we paid to create. In theory, the Internet can provide a level playing field, but even that is eroded by media consolidation and attempts to kill net neutrality.
I'm not arguing that it's illegal for Amazon to have kicked WikiLeaks off their servers. I don't think it was. However, even if it wasn't illegal, it was ethically wrong, and a prime example of the government and a corporation working together to bludgeon free expression and making it more difficult for the common person to access information critical of the power structure that said government and corporation represent.
Billy
http://newsnews.com
RADIO SHACK LEVEL II BASIC READY >_
