Quote:
Originally Posted by walleye
as a citizen of a former people's dictatorship, i can't decide if i should laugh or cry.
in pre 1989 romania, if you had a weapon permit, it came packaged with rude cops entering your property without your permision to check the whereabouts of your weapon(s) and ammo. you were supposed to register typewriters, copy machines and photo cameras with the local precinct. you were not allowed to posses just any kind of radio or tv set, only those that were "approved" ie certified that one couldn't receive BBC or Radio Free Europe with them. yea, you had to register those anyway. police scanners? i believe they started with seven years for that.
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It wasn't THAT bad. You might forget that everyone had to fulfill a quota. A doctor had to prevent having more than X deaths but at the same time he had to cure Y patients every month, just to prevent being kicked out. Same went for the Police. If they had too many arrests, it would look bad on their report. A lot of things were said to be put into practice, but were not. At least for "normal" people. God forbid having a beautiful "capitalist" house in Bucharest at that time. My grandfather served in the border patrols and then became village mayor. He warned people about inspections. After a while, word got out and they came after him. They didn't arrest him, no... they told him "next time when you warn them, ask them to put something aside for us, we have to make a living too".
I had a video player since 1984 and tons of cassettes. I saw "1984" in 1988, I saw Jesus Christ Superstar in 1987 or so. Passing them at the airport border only costed a couple of western ciggarets. Malboro packs were a second currency.
Anyway, OSP and DRM are nothing like the communist era. Hey, we log in to use this forum, it's no different from logging in online to play a game. I highly doubt they'll use trojans to browse through our porn preferences.