Tag Archive for 'current events'
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Bush has promised to double aid to Africa over the next five years. Having spent a month living in rural Tanzania, seeing Africa's poverty and its peoples' immense beauty with my own eyes, I can only welcome this news with open arms. In similar news, Nigeria has been granted $18bn in debt relief, something I'm sure will go quite a ways toward helping them. Really, I'm rather shocked to see how well Live8's efforts prior to the G8 summit are going. Now I just hope that these governments hold to their pledges. This is the real way to fight a war on terrorism. This is the real way to spread freedom and peace.
Having done a few college visits, I think I can say with certainty that visiting a place for one day, especially if you're in the company of people trying to make it look good, doesn't give you an idea of what conditions at the place are truly like. Nevertheless, this technique is good enough for Congressional representatives on a "fact-finding mission" to Guantanamo Bay. I could get all political, but I won't. Because the BBC has provided something better.
They watched the interrogation of three suspects, including one in which a detainee was read a Harry Potter book aloud for hours until he turned his back and put his hands over his ears.Who knew that terrorists had feelings similar to Christian fundamentalists?
The EU is getting ridiculous with its complaints about various companies and their "unfair monopolies". Today they announced a deal with the Coca-Cola company that requires, among other things, that Coke-branded fridges at retailers be at least 20% stocked with products from a different company. Earlier this year, a deal with Microsoft, in which the software giant would market a version of its Windows XP operating system without Windows Media Player under the dubious title of "Windows XP Home Edition N", was announced. Perhaps I'm being overly generous to the average consumer, but both these deals seem like an insult to the average consumer--not to mention an excellent source of confusion.
What's the EU planning to do for companies whose drinks are placed in Coke-branded fridges when consumers start thinking that Seven-Up is a Coke product? Or how about someone who gets a brand new computer, signs on to their favorite news site, and finds that, no matter how many times they click for the newest video feed, it refuses to come up?
The XP article notes that Real Networks' RealPlayer and Apple Quicktime are the main competitors for Windows Media Player. Guess what? I have all three. My primary music/video player, however, is Winamp. What I really love, though, is the fact that Quicktime doesn't even have the same capabilities as WMP, but it's still a competitor. You'd have to use iTunes and Quicktime to get the playback options of either WMP or RealPlayer, but... obviously matters like this are not a concern for the EU.
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