The attitude to democracy is more important than the democracy itself.

[Christopher Browne]

On 5/3/06, frankpeng-VsqqI1RANlHk1uMJSBkQmQ at public.gmane.org <frankpeng-VsqqI1RANlHk1uMJSBkQmQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> Statistics says there happened only one war between 2 democratic contries.
> To help people in dictatorship countries do help this world.

But this requires the assumption that installing this software would,
in fact, help people in countries that suffer from these various sorts
of tyranny.  It is not at all obvious that this is in fact the case.

> I heard that at least 3 Canadian soldiers are died last week in Afganhan.
> Also the victims of 911 are including Canadians.
>
> You may stay away from this business but your attitude towards democracy do
> hurt this soceoity.

That does not follow from the premises available.

It is possible that "Direct Democracy" could, perhaps even by mistake,
due to software bugs, become a conduit that transmitted information
about dissidents to some of the respective "tyrant"  governments.  We
*do* know, based on some initial investigation, that there are some
things about the security of the systems that aren't quite perfect;
there is considerable danger, in such matters, of this sort of thing
being twisted "to evil."

After all, as "open source" software, what is to prevent a Chinese
government agent from downloading copies, and setting up servers
purporting to be "in support of democracy," whilst the true intent is
for them to then collect information about dissidents.

And I don't know that much about the bona-fides of the writers. 
Perhaps they haven't benign intent.

> Any ways, negative attitude to world democracy and liberty movement is a bad
> thing for any body.

I disagree.  Whether or not any particular movement is a good thing or
not is a decidedly 'disputable matter,' and I think it is a plenty
healthy thing for there to be dissent about "disputable matters."
--
http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/linux.html
Oddly enough, this is completely standard behaviour for shells. This
is a roundabout way of saying `don't use combined chains of `&&'s and
`||'s unless you think Gödel's theorem is for sissies'.
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