US Tells Russia To Change Laws So It Can Say Allofmp3 Was Always Illegal

in

We recently wrote about how the US gov't has been saying repeatedly that it won't let Russia into the WTO if Allofmp3 comes back to life. This does seem rather ridiculous for a variety of reasons. After all, within Russia, the company has been found to be legal. And, secondly, it's not as if the US is in the WTO's good graces after ignoring the WTO's ruling on online gambling. If the WTO really wanted to punish the US for ignoring that issue, why not ignore the US's pleas to keep Russia out of the WTO itself? In the meantime, there's a bizarre statement in an article discussing Rep. Howard Berman once again saying that Russia needs to stop Allofmp3.com if it wants into the WTO. The article discusses how Russia has been slowly changing its laws following all this pressure from the US, and under the new laws, Allofmp3 may now be considered illegal. Yet, rather than focus on how it was the change of laws that made a previously legal service suddenly illegal, the article notes that "those legal changes could confirm what record companies have believed all along--that the Russian music stores are illegal." That seems rather bizarre, doesn't it? If the law gets changed, that doesn't confirm what's been said all along at all. It actually confirms the opposite. That the services were perfectly legal until a bunch of protectionist politicians who represent districts where the entertainment industry is based, bullied a foreign country into changing its laws to protect outdated business models.

(Via Techdirt.)

Old Fogeyism Isn't That Surprising

in

From Techdirt:

Last week Thomas Friedman penned a silly column claiming that Internet-based activism doesn't "count" as real political engagement. "Activism can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way — by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall. Virtual politics is just that — virtual," he says. As various people have pointed out, this is complete nonsense. I engaged in some campus activism in college in the late 1990s, and I have trouble even imagining how students coordinated their activities in the pre-email days. Blogs have proven an incredibly potent force for rooting out and publicizing injustice. And I'm sure the technologies that have evolved since I graduated are just as valuable to campus activists. Obviously, online activism by itself doesn't accomplish anything, but by the same token neither do telephone calls or newspaper columns. Rather, these are all tools that activists can use to coordinate their activities more efficiently. Many of the people who sign up for candidates' Facebook groups do go to the candidates' rallies or volunteer for their campaigns.

However, I think we shouldn't be too hard on Friedman. After all, it's pretty common for older people to complain about young people and their new-fangled ways of doing things. There are journalism professors who believe that you have to publish on paper to "count" as a serious journalist. There were lots of people who looked down their noses at Internet dating when it began, and some people still sneer at efforts to improve the online matchmaking process. And of course, there are books arguing that volunteer-driven content like Wikipedia is destroying our culture by undermining traditional ways of organizing information. Most of these arguments are silly, obviously, but it's not that hard to understand where they're coming from. If you've spent decades thinking about an activity in a particular way (if, say, you've been a print journalist for 30 years) you're going to have deeply-ingrained assumptions about how that activity is supposed to be done. And so when people start doing it a different way, it's inevitably going to seem incomprehensible and weird. So while I think Friedman's wrong, I don't think Friedman's being particularly obtuse. He's just fallen prey to garden-variety old fogeyism.

Karachi Bombing: Afghanistan and Pakistan Are a Single Front

in

So my Venus genius, h, informed me of this a blog posting that summed up the implications of the Karachi bombing:

The bombing of Benazir Bhutto's motorcade in Karachi signals a new level of integration of the politcal arena of Afghanistan and Pakistan. If, as now seems likely, the attack is traced back to the "Pakistani" Taliban of South Waziristan and al-Qaida, it will constitute a strike at the center of the Pakistani political process by groups based on the frontier who are part of both the transnational Afghan-Pakistani Taliban movement and the transnational global al-Qaida movement.

The moment is reminiscent of events in Central Africa in 1996. The 1994 genocide in Rwanda ended with the defeat of the Hutu-power regime, whose remnants and constituents fled into Eastern Zaire. This regional crisis in a distant border region unexpectedly linked up with the national political process of Zaire when the advent of elections made the citizenship of ethnic Rwandans (Kinyarwanda speakers) an issue that the Rwandan regime used as a vehicle for launching the war that overthrew the Mobutu regime. A "humanitarian" crisis on the frontier sparked a regional civil war than ultimately involved much of the African continent. Will the crisis of leadership and political integration among Pashtuns have similar ramifying consequences?


Great - I like where this is going....
Paddy Ashdown, former EU Special Representative in Bosnia-Herzogovina, warns of just such an outcome in an interview with Reuters
"I think we are losing in Afghanistan now, we have lost I think and success is now unlikely," he told Reuters in an interview.

"I believe losing in Afghanistan is worse than losing in Iraq. It will mean that Pakistan will fall and it will have serious implications internally for the security of our own countries and will instigate a wider Shiite, Sunni regional war on a grand scale."

"Some people refer to the First and Second World Wars as European civil wars and I think a similar regional civil war could be initiated by this (failure) to match this magnitude," Ashdown added.

Ok. That shit scares me.

Those who tried to kill Benazir Bhutto clearly perceive that a democratic Pakistan is the greatest threat their movement has faced in the region. Public opinion polls indicate that the Islamist parties that have sheltered them in the Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan are set to be wiped off the electoral map in any fair vote. The takeover by the frontier provinces by coalitions that support the international effort in Afghanistan could lead to serious effort to integrate the tribal agencies where al-Qaida and the transnational Taliban have their bases.

Paddy Ashdown correctly warns that this situation is more dangerous than Iraq. Is anyone listening?

Source: Informed Comment: Global Affairs

The SATA HDD Stage Rack

in


Now we're talking! Meet the PC and Mac compatible USB 2.0 SATA HDD Stage Rack. The value of this 2.5- and 3.5-inch compatible dock is obvious if like us, you've got gigs of unused storage laying around after years of SATA disk updates. Just pop in that old disk for instant expansion without having to first wrap the drive in a clumsy enclosure. Available now for €33 / $47. If you still don't get it, check the video after the break... you too will believe.

 


Source: Engadget