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You forgot to mention, Swedish pupils are banned from wearing clothes with their flag on, in case this is felt offensive and could symbolise nationalism, and the Swedish government extrajudicially ordered the disconnection of a server containing the Muhammed caricatures. None of the politicians who ordered it have been imprisoned or even convicted of that crime.

If you intended to portray attacks on those who are perceived to discriminate as generally weak then you seem to have struggled.

It occurs to me after reading many of the comments that most of the slashdotters are a caricature of the typical Do Gooder found in many films.

The situation is dire, lives are at stake, and these morons want to stop and perform some act of humanity for someone who really should just be shot, and, who will later come back and kill everyone.

Let's uphold the Freedom of Speech in a war zone so that the enemy will know what we are up to.

Let's catch and then release on bail terrorists.

Let's NOT conduct surveillance on the enemy or possible collaborators.

Since the average age on Slahdot is about 12 and the average mental age is about 6, I'm not surprised.

Thank you for your magnificent demonstration of religious polemical argument. This is a classic sample. Let us examine the finer points.

The religious man begins with a flourish: he must first find a label for his opponent's argument. He will call it sophistry. In fact, the religious man attempts no sort of dialectic examination whatsoever. In truth he has no argument, but he relies instead upon artifice to establish his position. So, sophistry it is.

The religious man can get away with this sort of non-argument because he perceives within himself a type of final authority. He does not need to argue, because whatever adjective he uses to describe his opponent's thinking is obviously true. It is self-evident. The religious man, you see, has utter certainty in himself. There is no question in his mind. The questions have all been settled.

This self-confidence lends the religious man a boldness needed for his next attack: name-calling. The enemy is a "god-lover." Religious men can afford to treat their opponents in this manner. They have a natural disdain for those whose ideas don't coincide with their own world-view.

Without missing a beat, the religious man introduces his next non-argument: the unsubstantiated generalization. He claims that these "god-lovers" are typically incapable, and that their mode of language is something called "twisting words." God-lovers "twist words." They must.

You see, the religious man only preaches to the choir. He is sharing his disdain among those who already believe as he does, and having his little chuckle at the word-twisting god-lover. Well, god-lovers are incapable of comprehending argument, so why attempt persuasion? This language isn't for them.

Next, the religious man incorrectly summarizes his opponent's argument. He produces a paraphrase that sounds something like what has been said, but introduces entirely new ideas to make the arguments seem banal and silly. He knows that other religious people will not have read his opponent's argument carefully, or will not have come to their own conclusion by themselves. So he can risk re-stating the argument so that it is firmly in his own rhetorical territory, where he can safely attack it.

The original argument made a well-known logical assertion that metaphysical attributes can't be empirically proven. In the paraphrased argument, this assertion becomes "it's difficult to put into words the obviousness [of certain things]." To the religious man, his axioms are "obvious" and quite provable, but they happen to be "difficult to articulate" apparently. But this verbiage was not in the original argument.

Then this: "people aren't allowed to ask for evidence for the silly crap you invent."

Of course, this was never said, nor even implied in the original argument. The careful reader of the argument would have seen that the exact opposite was in fact advocated: that people are allowed to accept subjective evidence for self-evident axioms. People can sense reason, so therefore it can be accepted. People can sense quantity, so therefore it can be accepted. People can sense spirituality, so therefore it can be accepted. That was the real argument, but the religious man must turn it into something else. It is "invented crap."

Then the religious man turns to his old stand-bys: straw men and caricatures. Although the argument never said anything about specific theologies, the religious man has a particular straw man that he favors and knows how to burn down quite effectively. He trots out the Judeo-Christian straw-man and makes him up in the most absurd way possible, using the language of ridicule. Oh, how it burns! See? This is what my opponent believes in! Isn't it absurd?

You see, the religious man is a common bigot. He presumes to tell those whom he wishes to discredit what they believe in, and hopes to make them feel silly about it. This is his method.

The religious man ends his diatribe by claiming that his opponent has violated one of his articles of faith: he h

Interesting. I usually try to stay informed on politics and had missed this. The source is questionable, of course, but the original newsletters turned up soon enough, and they are indeed quite damning. To be fair, they aren't the usual caricature of racist diatribe- they avoid the 'N' word, for example- but they are filled with thinly veiled comparisons of african-americans to animals, repeated reference to black-on-white violence, and a variety of wild assertions about african-americans, their predilections, and black culture. Here's the link: L.A. Riots

you need to see the pictures that go along with it really.

But that's nothing unique, drawing caricatures of the enemy is common place, the caricature of the Germans and the 'hun' slogans directed at them were no better, and they were the same race as the majority of people in the UK and US.

There's another reason.

One /.er humorously said that this was because it wasn't not Java.

There's a grain of through there.

Obj-C as pointed by a /. isn't popular at all. Only NEXTSTEP and its various clones (Mac OS X, GnuStep) use it.
iPhone developers will have to learn yet another C variant, to which they are most probably not used. Some of those developer may even never learned C or C++ in the first place.

Java is the platform attracting the most mindshare currently for embed platform (keep in mind it was initially designed for it) and the MIDP platform you find on lot of embed device is quite efficient. Java is a popular language for programming embed software.
Python is also a very popular platform for fast development. Lots of developers are singing it praises (see xkcd for a caricature).
Perl and Ruby are other scripting language that have some momentum too.

All those language have way to use native C and C++ APIs. (SWIG is an example of tool to automate such C/C++-to-scripting-language-of-choice bridges)

Had Apple gone for a C/C++ SDK, they would made it available to C and C++ developers (both are maybe the world's most popular language, even if not the most high level or efficient) but also for Java developers (very popular on embed platforms), for Perl/Python/Ruby (hello young motivate university students) for C# and other .NET language (hello microsoft drooldrones) LISP (yes (that even means (support (for it (in emacs))))) etc.

By going for Obj-C Apple made their SDK available to Obj-C developers. All 2 of them.
(and the third one who's motivated enough to learn Obj-C).

Conversely, the liberal would legislate the federal right to ALL property...

What a classic set of conservative distortions!

Name one liberal who supports the government taking "ALL" property. You can't because you are arguing against an imaginary caricature of a liberal.

Meanwhile, pm_rat_poison was right. Since 9/11, the people on my TV who claim to be "conservative" support tossing civil liberties and increasing government control on people while eliminating every last regulation on corporations. No one on the TV that even you would call "liberal" has ever suggested anything remotely close to the government taking all of your property.

I thought a parody would have to include, largely, parts of the original which are then distorted in one way or another so as to poke fun at it, society, or whatever.

Not the dictionary definition, so here's the dictionary one:
-----
      1.
                  1. A literary or artistic work that imitates the characteristic style of an author or a work for comic effect or ridicule. See synonyms at caricature.
                  2. The genre of literature comprising such works.
      2. Something so bad as to be equivalent to intentional mockery; a travesty: The trial was a parody of justice.
      3. Music. The practice of reworking an already established composition, especially the incorporation into the Mass of material borrowed from other works, such as motets or madrigals.
-----

I don't believe it qualifies under any of the above; though I'm guessing the case might have decided on that.

To me it looks like an original work (or a compilation of original works) that all unclude one thing: the name of an individual.

I'm going to guess that he would have gone with the 'Misappropriation' angle. That is: the authors are using Chuck Norris' name without his consent for commercial gain. Obviously.

This is different from using his name in sections of, say, a novel (where time and again it has been upheld that using real names is a-ok), as here the 'Chuck Norris' angle is practically the selling point*, whereas with a novel that is not likely to be the case.

* Then again, these jokes pre-existed as Hasselhoff jokes as well, I think? But if they were to have the book's 'Chuck Norris' replaced with 'David Hasselhoff' or 'John Doe', then it would very likely not sell nearly as well; thus the misappropriation angle.

You are absolutely wrong from my perspective as a college instructor of freshman physics students. Few students today would have survived the freshman physics courses I took back in the 1960's. They don't know simple trig identities, and the modern trend is to even take calculus out of the calculus based physics courses because they do better on standardized tests which basically use 7th grade math! I have had tears from female students who got a C and who "just have to have above average grades". Hell, she/they should have had a D but you cannot give anyone a "bad grade" or you will get a reputation as a hard ass and you will get creamed on the student evaluations at the end of the semester, which has career implications. And we in physics are the last bastion against grade inflation on most campuses these days, since we are generally used by colleges of engineering to eliminate the radically unworthy. As if ill prepared students are the best judge of what they need in a career in science-an area of academia where there are objective standards of what you need. Really!

Some areas of engineering have changed requirements for their freshman classes, particularly in the electronics and computer areas-areas Slashdot readers tend to be concentrated in. But, for example, you might need a basic understanding of trig and geometry to do decent computer graphics today, and those math skills are not taught or badly taught today, judging from the "brighter" and "more able" students I see today. There are some basic skills that haven't changed and the ability to use a calculator that contains every formula known to science and engineering (I can remember one that advertised exactly that a few years ago) doesn't help you understand what you are doing. And understanding is the difference between being a valuable worker in any science/engineering field and being a hack.

You sound exactly like the caricature of an engineer one sometimes encounters: someone who doesn't want to understand anything, just which engineering handbook to look up the right formula in. The requirements of a basic science and engineering degree have not changed in the 45 years I have been around academia. Computer programming at the freshman level is probably the sole exception-but I learned Algol 60 and assembly along with Fortran IV back in the day, and all in one semester. A freshman course in electrical engineering will probably say more about transistors today, but not a lot of deep substance: Ohm's law and basic circuit calculations are exactly the same and involve the same math techniques today that they did in 1950. If you went through a dumbed down math curriculum in high school, even if you took a calculus class, if you don't know some basic trig and geometry, if you have to wait until late in your sophomore year to learn about the determinants and matrices I learned about in a hick high school in Texas in the 1960's, you simply are not going to be able to advance as far in your learning as you should be able to in your freshman year of college. And you will emerge at the end of your four years of college less prepared than your predecessors did even 15 years ago: the worst of the decline has been in the last 20 years.

I think the natural caricatured response would be something along the lines of "God put it there to confuse the nonbelievers".

Probably not.

Otherwise these guys would certainly have noticed and made a big noise about it:

http://www.physorg.com/news4703.html

"Responses among the eight subjects varied with the person and stimulus. "

"For example, a single neuron in the left posterior hippocampus of one subject responded to 30 out of 87 images, firing in response to all pictures of actress Jennifer Aniston, but not, or only very weakly, to other famous and non-famous faces, landmarks, animals or objects. The neuron also did not respond to pictures of Jennifer Aniston together with actor Brad Pitt.

In another instance, pictures of actress Halle Berry activated a neuron in the right anterior hippocampus of a different patient, as did a caricature of the actress, images of her in the lead role of the film "Catwoman" and a letter sequence spelling her name."

So to me it indicates their brains organize stuff a bit differently.

I couldn't remember my password but I remembered I could post as an AC. I'm an expat working in Beijing China, and I agree with bits of the parent poster. No one here really cares about internet freedom, and everyone goes about their merry lives (oh yes, people here can be happy). More traditional issues like inflation, politics (the Olympics & Tibet) and corruption are at the fore.

On being monitored; I'm not sure. It feels like I'm free to do whatever I want online, and my local friends and colleagues never complain about it. However, in the wake of the recent Sichuan earthquake a local 17 year old filmed herself mouthing bullshit about the Sichuan earthquake victims (i.e. they deserved it etc.) and put it up on one of the Chinese Youtube imitators. I didn't keep track of the issue closely but she was arrested by the police within 2 or 3 days. Whether this occured through IP tracking and monitoring or whether it was one of her neighbours/friends who reported her to the authorities, I have no idea.

Having come from the Western bubble and reading years of Western press coverage of China, actually living in Beijing is a suprising experience. There are some remnants of Communism like middle aged stars singing patriotic songs on media channels broadcast on the subway, or first year University students having to go through a two week training camp marching to old Communist march tunes.. but in general, the social face of China is as capitalist as it can get. The amount of activity is ruthless and unbelievable. Many of the modern-age people are cold and urban. It's such a different beast from what the Western mainstream caricaturize it as. As for police in China, I've never met any ruder in my life across 4, 5 countries.

In all, I don't see the 1984 thing happening anytime soon. If it does, it would have to be extremely impressive to operate in stealth.. and given the general work attitude, efficiency and skill of China's current workforce (government or otherwise), I would say it would be amazing if they could achieve that level of control.

just draw a caricature of Mohammad and publish it in a few newspapers.

It would quicker for all of us if you would just say that you're an apologist that enjoys beating up on straw men. As it is you write large posts flaming imaginary people without justification.

No one here is going to cease lodging criticisms against oppression just because a government is less oppressive one day than the day previously. Just like you aren't going to stop being a smarmy lapdog. Only to you it's about China, while to your opponents it's about censorship. Subtract your caricatures and you have people that care more about the liberties of the Chinese (and everyone else, I might add) than you do.

***MINOR SPOILERS***

I thought that Calculating God was a terrible book. The main theme of the book was pretty good although not quite what I expected with a name like "Calculating God." The hoops that he jumped through, though, to promote the conflict with the laughibly-inept fundamentalist Christians, killed the story for me. I went in expecting a philosophical exploration and what I got was a lazy caricature of Christianity and a condescending revelation that "God isn't really a god."

Spielberg has said in an interview (I don't have a link to the original interview, which was several years ago, but there is an interview in Entertainment Weekly from April that says the same thing) that he purposely did not want to include the Nazis in the new movie. After his experience making Schindler's List, and all the emotional baggage the film brought along for him, he simply could not portray the Nazis as campy cartoonish bad guys anymore. During the making of that movie, he interviewed a lot of holocaust survivors and faced his own demons about the war, the holocaust, and the systematic extermination of an entire culture.

Once you've stared real evil in the face, I suspect that a caricature just doesn't seem appealing anymore.

If a black man did something horrible to you or your family, you have my sympathies.

A member of my family was beaten to death by a black man in the street. It happened before I was born. Routine mugging gone awry. She spent the rest of her "life" in pain and a vegetative state. It was the woman who raised my mother.

I don't blame race. I blame human nature. Most people of any color are just vicious animals running on fear and greed and desperation.

But I like to think -- or, I hope -- that I am a man and not a beast. And I believe that to be this I need, constantly, to overcome the paranoia that would make me a fearful animal and not a man. I believe abject racism is just one more form of animal paranoia.

I do not believe in a utopia where race does not matter. I learned that again in college, and it was my saddest lesson. You see, racist Chinese people say the same things about white men that you say about blacks -- that they (we) are fetishists, perverts, rapists, deviants, and worse. I learned this the hard way when, for six months, I dated a nice and good-looking girl from Shanghai. People said nasty things, whispered snide comments -- particularly two kinds of people: (1) uneducated whites, and (2) racist Chinese people. My mind's eye saw the caricature of the racist white man -- sitting on his front porch, spitting tobacco, and saying, "Watch out! Them watermelon-eating niggers take our women!" morphing into a Chinese student who was pointing at me, and the "nigger" becoming a stereotyped "Westerner" with my face. She was a nice girl, and though we did not have enough in common to continue the relationship -- our value systems were moving rapidly apart, and it became more and more clear that we, in basic philosophy, wanted very different things -- we certainly did not deserve the kind of comments we received. It was insulting to me and dehumanizing to her: The assumption by her "own people" seemed to be that she could not possibly be appealing as a human being, that the only reason anyone could want to date her was that he were sick, that he were some kind of twisted pervert and that the only appealing quality she could possibly have was the ethnicity she happened to come from. She had warned me when we started that people would say these things, and I had replied naively that it didn't matter, but I guess in fact I had really thought it wouldn't happen enough that it could matter. I had to learn the hard way that this wasn't true. It was severely disillusioning.

I do not want to be like those people who spoke insults and acid. I do not believe in utopia, but I reject their petty tribalism, and I am a better man than they were.

Are you? Are you a better man? A thinking, reasoning being with thoughts as well as instincts? Or are you a beast yourself?

I'm not asking you to change your mind immediately. I'm not telling you to discard what you think just because people call it "racism:" having a name for an idea and saying "it's bad" doesn't by itself mean it's wrong. I'm just asking you to moderate your thoughts for a bit, to let the man overcome the beast. Because I think -- or hope -- that in time and with thoughtfulness, you will conclude differently than you do now -- and I don't think bitterness is a very good route to peace for society, or to happiness for yourself.

Cheers.