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Free Software In Iran, KDE In Farsi
Elektroschock writes "KDE, the leading *nix desktop environment, is translated to Farsi (=Persian). Now native language KDE can be used in Iran as well. Farsi is written from left to right. Full story at Dot KDE. Arash Zeini (KDE Farsi) wrote an intresting article about FLOSS in Iran. His view: "It is not a secret anymore that FLOSS is gaining momentum all over the world. We witness an international move and acceptance of FLOSS in the private as well as in the public sector."" Update: 12/29 16:37 GMT by T : That should read "Farsi is written from right to left." (Thanks to Thomas Zander for pointing that out.)
Farsi is written RIGHT to LEFT. not the other way around. fix please
Now that the war in Iraq and Afganistan have died down... I see the KDE/Gnome wars are finally getting the front page /. attention they so deserve.
Am I the only one who read the summary and thought the description "the leading desktop environment" seemed to be included just to stir up trouble?
Disclaimer: I prefer KDE but really like Gnome config menus
Farsi is written from left to right.
!si ti egaugnul yzarc a tahw dna
http://www.flora.ca/floss.shtml
I can only hope FLOSS is catching on in Great Britain also.
Fluoride also.
> I'm glad to see that the ragheads are finally doing something right.
Actually the persians are indoeuropeans not semites, which means theye're ethnicly closer to us then say finns or hungarians.
that such a concept as LINUX and free-software in all its spectrum of variants is becoming the choice of many dictatorial regimes that have no access to the microsoft and apple cadre of products....
is LINUX gonna be a troyan horse that brings freedom through software or a tool that will make tech savvy to many non-democratic states...
... y Dios vio que Linux era bueno... Genesis 99.666
Farsi, like most middle-east languages, appears to be written right-to-left -- the same as our numbers are -- When the original algebra texts from Persia were translated, the translator kept the right to Left form of the numbers (little-endian). This is the reason for the big-endian / little-endian dicotomy in modern day computers -- we've been writing our numbers backwards for the last thousand years!
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Iran isn't an Arab language, and Persians (primary ethnic group of Iran) aren't Arabs.
Similarly, people in Iceland use Latin script even though they're not Italian.
The Arabic script is used in other non-Arab countries such as Pakistan and Afghanistan, and in the past had been used in Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, and I'm sure others. The script had spread along with Islam, but in many places was abandoned during the second half of the 20th century as part of pushes to westernize/modernize.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
farsi kde has been around for a while. ive been giving it to a lot of relatives to use when their computers go down because of virii, etc and they wish to use farsi. so yeah. this is good though. the majority of farsi software for windows ends up completley screwing up the computer. its usually virii infected and when you remove it the keymap doesnt restore properly leaving you with a well screwed computer.
--
The last digit of pi is four.
I would like to know how to use two languages on one system so that I have a Farsi environment or an English environment at will.
I have many friends, among them Iranians, Turks and Israeli, who would like to have a bilingual system. Multiple keyboards are also an issue. Preferably it would need a switch to go from one language to the next alternatively a reboot would be acceptable.
Any ideas, resources that I might look at?
Thanks,
Gerard
Oops, of course I meant "Farsi isn't an Arab language."
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
To me, it did not seem that the term "the leading desktop environment" was used in an exclutinary manner - rather, it seemed that the intention was to explain what KDE is (to the occasional Windows-only user that happens upon /.)
Sort of like Ford, the leading auto maker (even though they are probably not the worlds largest).
-tor
PS. I use Gnome and WindowMaker. KDE is a bit too "all-or-nothing" for me.
Don't mean to be a pedant--but Farsi is actually an Indo-European language--meaning it's related to Latin, German, Spanish, etc (and Hindi!). You can see this in some cognate words--mother in Farsi is madar, father is pedar, brother baradar, etc.
.. very different).
Arabic is a semitic language, related to Hebrew. In Arabic these words are very different. (My Arabic is weak but mother can be "umm," father "ab"
Both languages do use the same basic script--the Arabic script, though Farsi does have several additional letters.
KDE in Iran yo!
Persians are Aryan, which means they are more closely related to Germans.
They state that a major factor in adopting open source is the fact that most persians don't speak english and commercial companies can't supply native language versions. But since it's an islamic country most people speak arabic and could probably use already available version propriety software from neighbouring arab countries.
Secound since Iran is under sanctions will it be (technicly) illegal to cooperate with Iran based projects, accept patches from their developers and help them get "our" software?
I can well imagine that, as with any article on /. relating to anything not understood/foreign/not american there will be a fairly high noise to signal ratio around here. So, I thought I could mention that Farsi (written from right to left in a modifed Arabic script) is an Indoeuropean language with no relation whatsover to Arabic, apart from the script (The Alphabet for those who think that script means VBS or Perl) and loan words.
Iran, with its odd mix of religious and democratic government (The religious side seems to be making it very hard for the elected officials to do anything), also has an interesting approach to copyright. According to Islamic law If I understand it correctly(), God is the source of all invention and creation and therefore the holder of all copyright. That means that things like MS anti-piracy drives are unknown there, as practically everything is pirated.
While it certainly is an interesting way of looking at things, I can see countries like the US (surprise, they don't get on well with the Iranians) making it very difficult for the Iranians ever getting into the WTO because so called IP has no value there (Read: Britney will not make much cash on CD sales in Teheran and the Matrix 2&3 will flop just as it did in the west, but for other reasons).
According to what I know of Iran, Azeri, the language of Azerbaijan is spoken by about 25% of the population, but uses the same Arabic script and is interestingly referred to as Turkish by most Iranians.
...any news yet whether North Korea and Syria have plans to adopt free software?
Arash Zeini (KDE Farsi) wrote an intresting article about FLOSS in Iran. His view: "It is not a secret anymore that FLOSS is gaining momentum all over the world. We witness an international move and acceptance of FLOSS in the private as well as in the public sector."
Yes, dentists the world over agree that the collective state of mouths in Iran and the world over has improved since this widespread adoption of FLOSS technology.
--
But seriously, some acronyms work and others don't. FLOSS never seemed like a very good one to me.
Here's the Ethnologue entry for
Farsi and its position
in the family tree. The Ethnologue is the best
single source for reliable information about where
languages are spoken, by how many people, etc.
Well I know my saying for the next war, "No Blood For Proprietary Software"
forget it.
DAMN those teachers taught us Farsi the wrong way... right to left.
Now I have to take corrective training.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Even thoe I don't write or speak the language I think that it is great that the world is getting closer to using Linux in their respective languages! I don't believe we should force english or any other European language on to any one.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
This FarsiKDE project is a very important undertaking for
Iranians. It gives us the ability to use computational devices
in conjunction with OSS the way "we" want to use them and not be
dictated the rules about what things we can or can not do by
commercial products. Its gives the ability for Iranians not to
first of all learn another language in order to enjoy using a
computer, surfing the net etc...
It also gives us the opportunity to make our contribution to the
human collective of knowledge in the world. Hopefully KDE wont be
the first and last project of its kind, hopefully gnome and other
environments will be translated in order to give a wider range of
choice and diversity to the people using them. and hopefully
through diversity comes innovation and understanding.
I'm sure there are many Iranians out there that want to
contribute to the world, and farsiKDE is one those tools which
will give them their much deserved opportunity.
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
Well, according to the article, Iran is not a signer of the international copyright law. This means, as far as I understand (I'm no lawyer), that "copyright" as we understand it has no legal standing there.
I associate "free" and "open source" software with software made available under various licenses, i.e. pieces of legalese that use the power of copyright to control what can and cannot be done with the software. Now, if Iran's laws don't recognize even basic copyright for whatever reason, then surely these licenses are meaningless there, and everything can be legally copied in the eyes of local law?
From this perspective, I would be a bit catious as a free software (GPL licensed) author to actively support Irani users. I mean, if they give themselves the right to circumvent my license, and thus "steal" my software, why should I help them by making the software more attractive? Now, of course there is no monetary loss to me from limitless copying of software that is free to redistribute to begin with, but the different legal "flavor" of it all disturbs me somehow. Maybe it's just me being cheap, again. I think I need to meditate a bit over this.
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
And they get mad when you tell that they're Arabs. (they consider Arabs as being dumb)
I'm sorry, the number you have dialed is an imaginary number. Please rotate your phone 90 degrees and dial again.
Actually, you can write Farsi or Arabic left to right, just like you can write English from the right to left. It's just harder because you're writing the letters in the opposite direction you normally read them.
In any case, it's great to see these more difficult langauges and scripts being handled by the non-Microsoft world of software.
Of course, this is exactly what the people of BAM need after the earthquake...
I live in Europe, a friend of mine went to Iran recently and met his cousin. She is studying computer technology at a Teheran University. She does not have a computer. My friend brought her an old pentium 2...
OS X is not for Iran, export is propably not allowed. Windows is available and cheap. for EUR 3,- you can have XP or Longhorn. I want Farsi support on Linux for my sister who is learning Farsi.
Open Office does not (yet) support Farsi.
Thanks,
Gerard
arabic and hebrew are very, very similar:
FATHER:
arabic: ab
hebrew: av (the v in hebrew is the same letter used for b)
Salam, Shallom
et cetera. It continuously shocks me how close our languages are, and how far apart we are as 'peoples'. Ah well.
No, not farce, but farsi.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Excuse me for being a pedant here. But the only reason the word "Farsi" has become current in English is because back in 50's, 60's, 70's neither the f_____g State Department nor the CIA knew that we had a perfectly good and venerable word in English for the language, i.e. "Persian." Listen, to anyone who knows the language (own horn tooting here) it sounds silly. It's completely mispronounced as it's employed in English, the accented syllable for one is just wrong. We don't say, "Do you speak francais?" (imagine it said with American accent, butcher the vowels, heavily glide the last syllable, clearly pronounce the "n"), and the same with any other language. Why? Because we already have perfectly good words for these languages in English. Calling it "Farsi" only highlights Western ignorance and it's exoticisation of the Eastern/Muslim/Oriental other. So why use it? Az kasi ke nedane va nedane ke nedane.... or words to that effect (if memory serves)
How do other people, who are forced to comply with US export restrictions address computing needs in countries like Libya, Sudan, Iraq and Iran. Is there any possibility to comply and still be able to have a moderately modern system.
VIA C3 CPU comes to mind and Via Mainboards. Almost anything except software should be optainable.
It is not possible to use technology to solve social problems
Gerard
The sanctions in question date back to the crisis in 1980. They are, to my knowledge, a US-only affair, but hey, in the words of W, "You'r either with us or against us."
The point is that FOSS contributions ignore national boundaries, and this is not illegal. Currently if I (a US citizen) sell the rights to a book I wrote to a Dutch company, they are not bound by US export law and can sell that book in Cuba and Iran... However, I cannot sell the rights to a Cuban company.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
What the hell is floss? Neither in the main blurb nor in the article about it does it specify what floss is. And because they named it with a completely generic word, my google search gave hundreds of dentistry-related sites. Lame.
So Knoppix, a single CD with KDE and whatever else you want to put on it that just works when you boot it, should sell better than the half a dozen Microsoft CDs that would do the same thing with much more effort.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Ports to languages like Farsi are interesting, but maintainers of applications really need to focus on Arabic, Hindi, whatever the primary Chinese used for computers is, Spanish and English. If your application ships with these languages, you cover your bases VERY nicely. Let localized distributions help you out on the smaller languages (*cough*klingon*cough*).
Don't get me wrong, I applaud these people for their work, but package maintainers can easily get caught up in a sort of fad around certain translations, and sometimes that hurts if the biggest languages are not covered well.
On another front, Gnome also supports right-to-left languages, so don't feel you have to chose KDE... choose whichever supports your needs best from an application standpoint.
... but the people of Iran, that might be another thing entirely.
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
One language option that my RedHat installation at work came with was Farsi. Just for kicks, I selected that, and most text was indeed little squiggly lines. To get actual work done, I changed back to English, though for unknown reason one bit of Farsi stuck around. So I still have a home directory called squiggle-squiggle-squiggle.
-Lars
Because then you would have read to the end of my sentence, where I mentioned loan words.
?
--
Good moderators mod up, not down - that's a waste of a mod point.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I've spent a few hours here and there trying to get farsi support in KDE and mozilla working without success.
I defy you all to point me to a place on www.kde.org that explains how I get from a standard install of KDE to let me edit a document in farsi using KWord.
I seem to be missing the fonts I need and I don't know where to find them. I also don't know how to install fonts in KDE.
That's the same reason I mentally add numbers left-to-right. My wife thinks I'm nuts, but it's easier for me. You can get a quick estimate of the results by only adding the leftmost 2 or 3 digits instead of working through the entire problem; the numbers with the largest effect on the result are processed first.
The only problem is that you have to maintain a stack instead of a bit to handle carrying, but that's pretty straightforward.
Example: 1747+241. The first operation is "1747+200=1947". Next is "1947+40=1987". Finally, "1987+1=1988". Note that the partial sum converges much more rapidly with the end answer than it would in right-to-left addition.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
As others have mentioned, Farsi and Arabic are very different languages. They do share a common script, with minor variations. For example, Arabic has a B but no P and Farsi has a P but no B (pronunciation-wise, the scripted letters are obviously different).
Because they share a similar script however, one of the hardest parts of doing a Farsi translation (a right to left script), is already done. The only thing left to do is to translate the text in the programs, which of course, is no small affair. Kudos to the guys that did it. Having done some localized versions of my own apps (English & Spanish, primarily), I have an idea of what an ordeal it can be. I can't imagine doing an OS.
Latin is written from left to right, and roman numerals have the bigger units on the left
Yeah, I'm Canadian, and I agree with you (the Aussie), I think the American is on crack. Or maybe just being perverse.
The "200 six packs" phrase is a good example. Maybe he should say "two hundred and zero six packs" for clarity? No, the people would think there was 0.06 bottles of beer (a bottle cap?) extra. I guess he's stuck with "6 packs, two hundred of them".
Any way you count 'em, though, let me know where the party is.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
I think the aryan-german connection was just a Hitlerian fantasy because he percieved the Aryans as a conquering race and figured they must be the ancestors of the Germans after learning the linguistic connection.
or something like that.
common cultural traits don't imply common genetics
Try adding the following numbers by hand:
92937545168
88484564556
===========
Then try multiplying them, or even subtracting them. The only 'simple' operation that we do from left to right is division, and division is clearly an inverse operation. Even then, many of the interim operations occur right to left.
It's in that respect, that the 'natural' order for numbers would be 'little-endian' (least significant digits first).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
That would be Little-Endian. Endian-ness specifies which end you start with,. Intel X86s are little-endian, while Motorola (680X0) is Big-Endian (as is english, other than in the teens).
The naming convention is taken from "Gulliver's Travels", where one of the societies was suffering a schism between those who chose to break their eggs starting at the little end (little-endian) and those who started at the big end (big-endian).
(bit of trivia: Issac Asimov did an 'Annotated Gulliver's Travels'. He considered it to be one of the earliest examples of English science fiction).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
i agree with you. and i really don't like nationalist/racist people. but if we wanted to just look at this historically, then there is a lot of evidence pointing to a common ancestry between many of the peoples of europe and the early settlers of the persian platue. Hitler was simply using this as an excuse to take over the western areas of russia. This was really simply a resource grab. He's an asshole, don't get me wrong! ;o)
Guess what? Any candidate in a US election that refuses to sign or swear a loyalty oath will not be able to take office. Hell, you can't even get a government job in many states without signing a loyalty oath. The presence or absence of loyalty oaths is hardly the best register of democracy to look at here.
I think you meant to say "linguistically", since from language perspective you are correct. Germanic languages are somewhat related to persian (amongst other languages), more so that fenno-ugric (finnish, hungarian, estonian) ones. But ethnicity implies much wider range of things, from cultural to genetic attributes... in which case fenno-ugrians and persians both are fairly distinct from anglo-saxons.
I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
The sanctions in question date back to the crisis in 1980. They are, to my knowledge, a US-only affair
Yes, but that matters more than you think.
Iran has a decaying air fleet. It can't get updated parts or new planes from Boeing (obvious) but it can't get the same from Airbus either because Airbus uses some components of US origin in their planes.
Mmmm.. Donuts
The Ethnologue is the best single source for reliable information about where languages are spoken, by how many people, etc.
The Ethnologue is written by splitters, though; for example, where most people count one language, Farsi, the Ethnologue has two, Western and Eastern Farsi. They count at least a dozen dialects of Arabic as seperate languages, four different dialects of Romanian as seperate languages and at least eight different dialects of Italian as seperate languages. Linguistically correct or not (some are unarguably correct from a linguistic standpoint, some are very iffy), they tend to give smaller numbers for any one language then other sources, especially as written language tends to be shared; all dialects of Arabic, no matter how little two speakers can understand each other, read and write the same language.
Why, I floss sometimes twice a week!
My dentist tells me it will help prevent gingivitis and gall darnit, it feels pretty good, too!
I think everyone should floss.
"You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake."...Tyler Durden
My understanding is that very few Iranians actually speak fluent Arabic, and that the Arabic/Persian lingustic divide is somewhat analogous to the English/French one in terms of national pride and pissiness. :)
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
I agree - the Ethnologue does make finer splits than are sometimes warranted and this does result in smaller speaker numbers than other sources would give. Sometimes this unjustified, but in most of the cases mentioned I would argue that it is justified. Now and then, the Ethnologue is simply wrong. In my experience, this occurs in cases where only a few specialists have the up-to-date information and it hasn't yet reached the compilers. But there's a reason that I said that the Ethnologue is the "best single source": although for particular languages, regions, and language families there are sometimes better sources, there isn't any other single source that is comparable in scope or accuracy to the Ethnologue. If you really need detailed and accurate information, you shouldn't stop with the Ethnologue - you need to look for more specialized reference works and, especially in the case of smaller languages, talking to specialists may be necessary. But the Ethnologue is the place to start.
Hmm, I admit I don't know much history of the Middle east from about 600AD 'till the renaissance, but I seem to recall that Persia (never called Persia!) spent a lot of time fighting Rome as a nation in decline, and then Rome started to decline.
Now look what you did, you've gotten me onto one of my longwinded ramble topics.
One of the problems people have with keeping the kingdoms in this area straight is that they tend to share the same name. Iran is simply the last in a sequence of little-related governments which have occupied the same area for several thousand years.
Persia as we know it - Iran - and the ancient/classical Persia share little more than their name between the two. The area known classically as the Persian Empire stretched from roughly the Indus River into the middle east, generally as far east as Iraq in Roman times, but during Greek times as far as modern Turkey and Egypt. That original Persian Empire began showing up in the mid-500s BC under Cyrus the Great, overthrowing what was left of the Babylonian kingdoms, a sequence of generally short-lived and ephemeral affairs running back almost, but not quite, into deepest antiquity.
(Even then, the ruling Achaemenid dynasty (which the kingdom was also named after) were from Media, a different region and culture within the area!)
Now, this particular Persian empire went down because of a young fellow named Alexander (y'might have heard of him) in the 330s-320s BC, and the whole region was ruled by a sort of pseudo-Greek monarchy for awhile. They were an attempt to impose a Hellenistic (NOT Hellenic, which is the democratic style most people know, but an absolute and militarist monarchy instead) veneer over the old Persian-style monarchy, and didn't do terribly much other than create a period of instability in the area for several generations as Alexander's "successors," and later their own successors, warred and plotted with one another. They were just starting to burn themselves out when the Romans came onto the scene in the west - and someone else in the east.
When people think of the particular Persian empire which tangled with Rome, they're thinking of the Arsacid monarchy, known at the time as Parthia. The Parthians hail from, well, Parthia, in the Iranian plateau, first started to chew at the Seleucid Empire's fragmented holdings around 250 BC and built up their own empire on top of the Hellenistic ones for the next century, before finally starting to tangle with the Romans in the first century BC. It was this Persian empire, the Parthians, which first started slapping the Romans around at battles such as Carrhae, Marc Antony's embarassing campaign in the east, and so on.
The Parthians soon tore themselves apart in dynastic squabbling, as well as having the major economic cities of the east torn apart in the great Roman invasions under the emperor Trajan. By 224 BC, a fellow named Ardashir came once again out of the east - in this case, if memory serves me, actually from the region of Persis/Farsis, proceeded to overthrow the Parthian empire, introduced several reforms in economics, military, and government, and became the first ruler of a very powerful, revitalized kingdom known today as the Sassanid or Sassanian Empire. This one is the Persian Empire you're thinking of, and fought a number of embarassingly successful campaigns against Rome, cumulating in the disaster of 260 when Shapur I actually captured the Emperor Valerian in battle. This empire continued along, doing very well for itself and being one of the great powers of the world, until the great Islamic wars of expansion blew out of Arabia. Pretty much nobody could stand against these guys, and the Sassanids were no exception, their last gasp being the Battle of Nehawand in 642 AD where their last great army was destroyed.
It's only by this date that an actual Islamic Persia exists, but it's still just the latest in a long string of Persias. The one now called Iran
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
Iran is democratic. It is, after all, the Islamic Republic of Iran. President Khatami was initially elected through mass voter turnout in 1997 to democratically overthrow the ruling "party" (I can't remember the name of the incumbant). Granted, there are a few limitations. To run for president you have to be a cleric and all candidates have to be approved by the religious authority, but the American republic has similar limitations. Presidents have to be 45 years of age (or something like that) and have to be born in the U.S. (And, for all intents and purposes, have to be affiliated with the duopoly of ruling parties.)
Do a little research before you label a country a "dictatorship".
-Lawrence
Visit Zymurgy Records!
Persians are not just Aryan, The term Persian is a collective
name for the people that live in Persia. That includes turkemen,
kurds, baloochi, afghani etc...
On another note the Germans are not the only Aryan, the English
and French are also Aryan as far as I know.
But these are all matters of race, in today's globalized world such
futile issues are meaningless because they bring about
indifference and disunity. Who cares who comes from what race all
that matter is that, that person is moral and ethical in their
dealings.
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
It more than English/French in linguistic terms. Farsi and Arabic come from completely different language families. Farsi is Indo-European (like Latin, French, German, Hindi, and English) whereas Arabic is Semitic (like Hebrew).
In terms of nationalism, the English/French analogy works. Persians, in my experience, aren't all that fond of Arabs.
They share a script and some vocabulary, but that's about it.
And Arabic is not commonly spoken in Iran at all.
-Lawrence
Visit Zymurgy Records!
OK... you've got a lot of stuff wrong here.
...) are NOT Aryans. They are, however, Indo-Europeans.
1. Persians are Persians. Turkomen are Turkomen, not Persians. Kurds are Kurds, not Persians (though Kurds are Aryans and speak a dialect of Persian). The other peoples in Iran are NOT Persians. Lurs are Lurs. There are more; I can't think of them all right now. Persians are a small majority in Iran, making up just over 50% of the population.
2. Germans are not Aryans. Hitler simply didn't know what the term Aryan meant. It does not mean "white" or Indo-European. Aryans are a sub category of Indo-Europeans who live, primarily on the Iranian plateau and in India. The English and French (and Germans and Norwegians and Danes and
And all this stuff is not futile and meaningless in the modern world. Nationalism based on real or percieved ethnicity is still one of the most potent unifying forces for a sovereign state.
-Lawrence
Visit Zymurgy Records!
Dosen't sound like a true democracy to me.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
The US president has to swear an oath as well.
They also only elected a parliment, and president not their head leaders.
>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;
The US republic originally did not allow election of senetors or of the president. It was still a democracy.
I might be mistaken, but I beleive the "Assembly of Experts" is a group of Islamic Clerics who are still very fundmentalist.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
"Leader of the Islamic Revolution" is not the same as the leader of Iran. While he has a great deal of power, he is not the sole bearer of power.
I agree that the past election was a giant step foward but is not were near a real election. No third parties (such as the U.N.) were there to verify the votes.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The UN didn't verify the votes in the last US election either...
If Iran is a democracy so was Iraq too since the elected Saddam Hussien as their "president" in the past year (before we "liberated" them.)
>>>>>>>>>>>
*That* wasn't a real election. There is no reason, however, to believe that the last election in Iran was the same way, because there was wide public support for Khatami.
I wouldn't consider Iran anything close to a democracy yet.
>>>>>>>>>>>>&g t;
More accurately, Iran's government has democratic elements within a theocratic framework. That's not a democracy, but its also a huge step away from totalitarian regimes like Iraq. Saddam took power by force. Iran's clerics were put into power by the people.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The US republic originally did not allow election of senetors or of the president. It was still a democracy.
Benjamin Franklin disagreed. He was adamant that what they had created was a republic, not a democracy. Considering the only people who could vote were landowning men and most of the people in the federal government, including the president, were appointed (the electors actually had power, unlike now), it's questionable whether the American government actually was a democracy to start out.
My kid's program, Tux Paint, has been translated into over 30 languages, including Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Hebrew (right-to-left) and Tamil. :^)
;^) )
I'll gladly accept a Farsi translastion. (Or any other that's still missing
I'm not so sure about that, I recall that back in the past century when I downloaded netscape from a local mirror in Poland it, displayed a warning dl'ds prohibiting from Afghanistan, Cuba and some other countries. While it's probobaly impossible to enforce it might still be a legal requierment.
Clinton tried to do something like what I stated above (prohibit foreign companies from breaking US embargoes). However, what you are talking about is something different. Netscape is/was a US-based company. Therefore it is perfectly appropriate that they are bound by US trade laws.
OTOH, if I take the Linux kernel as a, say, Egyptial company, I NOT under US trade law, and could export to Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, etc. provided that this was legal under Egyptian law!
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
This is actually the first time I've seen Christian non-sequitur crap on /. - I'm impressed at the reach those little bastards have. Actually, I'm just really wired and doing monkey work at 5am.
Bite me.
When life gives you lemons, you CLONE those lemons, and make SUPER-LEMONS. -- Dr. Cinnamon Scudworth, Ph.D
shut up faggot