Slashdot Mirror

Budgets for all these different groups are growing,' says Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace, which compiled the data on funding of the anti-climate groups using tax records. 'These groups are increasingly getting money from sources that are anonymous or untraceable.'

I would like to see what Greenpeace has to say to these:

2003 - http://www.eco-imperialism.com/the-enron-of-nonprofits/
2010 - http://consumersforpeace.org/index.php?filename=archive-irs-audited-greenpeace.html
2011 - http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2011/08/12/greenpeace-accused-shady-fund-raising.html

Who threw the first stone and who retaliated? Discuss.

Most electronic payment systems have very short lives.

• Exxon Speedpass (1997-2004 for uses other than gas stations) Tried, then dumped by McDonalds.
• RFID chip embedded in arm (2004)Used in some nightclubs in Barcelona.
• i-Button (1994) A ring or fob mounted contact-type ID device. Used for bus ticketing in Turkey, and for login security elsewhere.
• EMV Contact-type smart cards. (1995-date) Popular outside the US, especially for stored-value applications.
• American Express ExpressPay (2005). Tried, then dumped by McDonalds. Still used by OfficeMax.
• T-Cash (2011) Send money from your cell phone. Tried in India.

You're drawing false conclusions from incomplete data. The more Sikh a state is, the greater the odds that some will support the terrorist group Babar Khalsa, or the more Christian a state is, the more likely they'll support Christian supremacist groups like the BNP or White Pride. The reason American Muslims reject terrorism more than Muslims in a place like Pakistan could more likely be because American Muslims have nearly 100% literacy rate while Pakistan is around 50%.

Heck, the ADL believes that swastikas and anti-semitism shouldn't fall under free speech either. Rauf didn't call for an abandonment of the first amendment, he said that people shouldn't hide hate speech behind it and pretend its benign.

Sufism is not a sect, you can be Sunni and Sufi, it's a philosophy that's found all over the Muslim world. Arguably, Pakistan is a sufi country.

Like I said, Saudi doesn't represent islam, it represents a dictatorship. The king controls it; he appoints and fires religious scholars who agree with him, despite the fact that nearly zero scholars outside Saudi agree with his warped ideas. The other 95% of the 1.5 Billion Muslims who don't live under his rule are nothing like him, which is why you see Jordanian Muslims planting flowers at churches or Indonesian Muslim leaders protecting churches of minorities. The majority of Muslims support religious freedom, look at places like Senegal for an example of how most get along. Cooperation and tolerance isn't newsworthy despite being the norm, so it's ignored.

To a regular muslim, sharia includes things as basic as praying five times per day. It's one of those words that people with an agenda have latched onto and focused on what the scary people do. There is plenty in the various muslim traditions to forbid things like the stoning of women. It's just that the crazies want to stone women so they pick and choose the parts that give them political cover, especially among the uneducated who aren't likely to question what they are told. Here's an discussion of stoning (for adultery, as stoning for a barehead is essentially non-existent) in sharia that illustrates the point.

It's kind of like how plenty of homophobes get all worked up about the line in leviticus that says,"Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination." but are perfectly happy to scarf down the "Endless Shrimp" meal at Red Lobster despite lines in leviticus that say things like, "Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you."

Because Malaysia has been claiming certain Indonesian dances are Malaysian.

http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2009/09/16/issue-%E2%80%98betawi-group-threatens-harass-malaysians%E2%80%99.html

The Indonesians are pissed off with the Australians *not* the Americans. Read this article from The Jakarta Post: http://www.thejakartapost.com/detailheadlines.asp? fileid=20070208.A03&irec=2

http://www.thejakartapost.com/detaillatestnews.asp ?fileid=20050610135849&irec=3

However, some scientists who examined the remains, contest the study's conclusions and argue that the Hobbit belongs to the Homo sapiens species.

Professor Maciej Henneberg, head of anatomy at Adelaide University, said he thought the bones were simply those of a normal human stunted by microcephaly.

Henneberg spent several days in Jakarta last month helping to document the bones.

Harry Widianto, a paleoanthropologist at Yogyakarta's Archeology Agency, said that the Hobbit was best regarded as a sub-species of Homo sapiens in its evolutionary stage between 18,000 to 30,000 years ago.

Harry said that the debates over the Hobbit's species were a consequence of theoretical differences over human evolution

Dr. Dean Falk of Florida State University came to those conclusions by analyzing virtual endocasts of a variety of skulls, including a microcephalic, Homo erectus, modern human and Flores.
...

First, and most important, it is radically different from the microcephalic specimen she compared it to. This isn't a conclusive denial of Jacob's claim that Flores is nothing new -- one skull isn't enough -- but Flores and the microcephalic are so different it's hard to imagine how they could be one and the same.

Infants with microcephaly are born with either a normal or reduced head size. Subsequently the head fails to grow while the face continues to develop at a normal rate, producing a child with a small head, a large face, a receding forehead, and a loose, often wrinkled scalp. As the child grows older, the smallness of the skull becomes more obvious, although the entire body also is often underweight and dwarfed. Development of motor functions and speech may be delayed. Hyperactivity and mental retardation are common occurrences, although the degree of each varies. Convulsions may also occur. Motor ability varies, ranging from clumsiness in some to spastic quadriplegia in others.

I remember an article from several years ago that ran in the printed version of The Jakarta Post (link to paper, not article) stating that the Indonesian government ran something like 97% of its computers on pirated versions of Windows and Office. Corruption asside, this and similar cheap alternatives could help stamp out pirating at the government level, perhaps inducing a positive trickle down effect.