The problem that Islamic countries in general have is not that they have stopped being inventive
Up to here, I basically agree.
but that strict prohibition of usury makes it difficult to create the kind of economy that we know in the west. Much of todays technological innovation requires big bucks to bring it to market, and it's hard to start up a technological firm without borrowing money.
Here you (perhaps unintentionally) oversimplify.
The prohibition on usury (normally charging interest, or more than the capital) does not mean that borrowing is prohibited, nor that borrowing is the only avenue for financing.
Islamic economics is based on things different from Western economy as we know it today.
Risk Sharing
Both parties in a partnership contract share the risk. This is in contrast with Western economy where the risk is avoided by being transferred to the other party. This is seen as unfair.
Equity based
Partners share the assets and equity. Western society has a large portion of it based on debts. Also, there are derivatives which are basically speculative and more akin to gambling than finance and investment.
So, think about venture capital where the lender co-owns your invention, rather than just borrowing money from a bank who bases their income on debts of others.
You are confusing many things here: Arab vs. Muslim vs. Middle Eastern vs. Afghan. Other posters have refuted this one sufficiently, but it only goes to show how well America understands the rest of the world, when an Afghan is termed "Arab" not by one, but two people who are in a position to know better.
This is just like lumping together American Evangelicals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Solomon Islands' Mormons, and Filipino Catholics all as "Christian" and making them an enemy or something.
You are also mixing up eras, and drawing blanket judgements.
Arab culture hasn't contributed shit to the world for the past several centuries.
Perhaps nothing global in scale, but the culture itself is very alive in literature, poetry, and other areas. You do not hear about it because it is not in your own language or in your field(s) of interest.
Lookup Nobel prize winners: Naguib Mahfouz (Literature), Ahmed Zewail (Chemistry), Elias James Corey (Chemistry), Peter Brian Medawar (Medicine) and Ferid Mourad (Medicine). Some are Christians and some are Muslims, but all are Arabs.
Also, what did (say) Iceland, India, China ,...etc. contribute in the last several centuries? Not as much as Western Europe or its daughter cutlures (America,...etc)
My point then is that the parent poster wasn't too far off in implying that Arab culture has added little to the world besides some (admittedly very useful) math hundreds of years ago.
You need to check other fields too, such as Avicenna and Al Razi in medicine, Avicenna, Al Farabi, Avempace, Abubacer, Averroes in Philosophy. Alhazen in optics, Al Tusi in Astronomy, Gaber Ibn Hayyan and Maslama Al Majriti (Madrid) in Chemistry and others in various fields too many to list here (Google for Muslim Science or Islamic History of Science).
The point is, every civilization has a golden age: Ancient Egypt had theirs early on, Greece and Rome had theirs later. The Muslim world had that after. Now it is the age of Western Europe, and its daughters.
Civilization does not belong to one people exclusively, and not others. It is an all-human thing. Some contribute less now, but more later, and vice versa. Civilization is an accumulation of knowledge over millenia from various cultures.
Do some Googling again: Lookup Dr. George Saliba specifically and his writings on Islamic contributions to Science. His conclusion? The European Rennaisance could not have happened without Muslim works in Science, and the borrowing continued well into the 17th century.
Now, when you say things like:
They couldn't even get their own oil out of the ground if it wasn't for western engineers and equipment.
Much of middle east/arab culture is clearly diseased.
Only by shedding it and adopting lessons from people more advanced then them in science, organization or particular skills can they hope to once again contribute to civilization.
Some cultures are better than others.
Western civilization is clearly superior to the Arabic/Islamic subcultures that supply anti-US terrorists. Don't believe me? Think I'm prejudice? Go ahead and come up with something that the Arab world does better than the western world in modern history.
All this stems from a colonial mentality of "civilize the savages".
Why? Because the middle east has largely been ruled by dogmatic, corrupt and brutal dictors or otherwise severly backwards regimes for the past several centuries.
Here, you have a point, and a start of a good diagnosis of what is wrong there.
Let us do some digging: Almost all the Arab and Muslim countries were under colonial rule since the mid 19th century or so. During World War I, the Arabs sided with the British against the Ottomans, and were promised independance and a state. That did not happen. After World War II, military coupes starting popping up all the place (much like Africa and a large portion of Latin America). These gave rise to military dictatorships, much of them are present now across the region. These are very repressive and do not tolerate any form of dissent (think about how Saddam was, and you get the idea).
It wasn't safe to be a Jew in Muslim Spain either. The philosopher Moses Maimonides had to flee Spain to avoid attempts to convert him by force. He fled to Cairo (1159) where he became head of the Jewish community in Egypt.
So, another Muslim country (Egypt) gave refuge to the Jewish sage/philosopher. That says a lot I think: that not all Arab countries were the same, and that many were tolerant. Remember where the Jews who were expelled from Spain and Portugal went? Many ended up in the Ottoman Empire.
Also, your conclusion that is was not safe for Jews in Spain in not correct. There were lots of Jews in Muslim Spain, the most famous is Ha-Nagid and his father, who were ministers to the Muslim rulers.
because if something's already in the Koran, there's no need to say it again, and if it isn't, then it's false and mustn't be said
Is that your own conclusion or you have a reference for that? The only quote similar to this one is an apocryphal tale about the Caliph Omar alleged burning of the Library of Alexandria (that is about 4 centuries before Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Modern research shows that this tale is not true.
See (eg.) Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science
Toby Huff is somewhat prejudiced, to say the least. Google some time for Dr. George Saliba's replies to his "research".
UNIX trademark is an example
on
Who Wrote Linux?
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· Score: 2, Informative
You are right.
Even the word UNIX is not exclusively for the operating system we all know and love (or hate!)
When NCR was part of AT&T, I was one day called by my manager because he was alerted that some company selling "pesticides" was using UNIX as a trademark to its product.
Second, the US-backed forces in Afghanistan in the '80s largely preceeded the Taliban, which is mostly a Pakistani export.
You are partially right here. The Taliban came into being in the mid 1990s.
However, they are not mostly Pakistani export. They are a reaction to what happened over the decades of foreign invasion, international neglect, civil war, insecurity,...etc.
After the USSR pulled out of Afghanistan, the US (and the rest of the world) lost interest. The Mujaheddin who fought the Soviets and successfully drove them out formed a week government. The various factions started fighting among themselves, and in 5 years (I think 1990 to 1995) more than 50,000 civilians died in Kabul alone because of the fighting.
The factions included many warlords who were later part of the Northen Alliance, and who are now in power. Among them are General Abdul Rasheed Dostum (Uzbek Communist), Ahmad Shah Masood (who was killed prior to the US invasion shortly after 9/11), Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (currently a fujitive wanted by the USA), Rabbani (ex-president),...etc.
Apart from the fighting, there were looting, rape, and general insecurity.
Afghan people at the time were disillusioned by all that is going on, how can they manage to drive out the USSR, but then fail miserably and turn against each other?
Some religious students living in refugee camps formed militias to fight the thiefs, extortionists,...etc. This developed into the Taliban as we knew them.
They were supported by certain elements in Pakistan (where they spent a lot of their youth, in refugee camps), but I would not call them mostly a Pakistani export just because of that.
There are clear differences between the two cases: the EU may be missing some money under its own control. This happens in many governments, passively, or actively. Passively due to lack of accountability, or actively because of corruption, embezzelment,... etc. In Canada, there was the HRDC scandal a few years back. That part is normal.
However, in Iraq, the situation is different: The US has actively sought to occupy an oil rich country at a time where world oil reserves are limited or declining. Iraq's oil production was very limited for 12 years after the UN sanctions spearheaded by USA and UK. Once the country was occupied, oil wells and pipelines were operating at full capacity again within weeks.
The funds were supposed to go to a fund. That fund was controlled by the US CPA. The US Administration keeps asking Congress for more money to stay there (was it 4 billion a month?). Both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz never wanted to pin down a figure when pressured to come up with one. It would be really convenient to get hold of some of that money, and not have to beg the Congress for money every now and then. Or, you can compare that with the Iran-Contra scandal: The Pentagon and/or the Administration get money under the table and funnel it under the table.
This is to say nothing about Cheney, Halliburton, et al, which are motivated by greed, and are a major supporter of this war, out of financial gain.
I think this goes far beyond a simple misplacement of funds.
This is the same company that at one time hosted many Arab or Muslim web sites, including:
Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR)
Islamic Society of North America
Islamic Association for Palestine
Holy Land Foundation
Al-Jazeera television channel
Al-Sharq newspaper
Al-Islam.com
And other sites too.
Just before September 11, 2001, the FBI confiscated the servers that hosted all those sites, causing them to go offline for days. This was covered on Slashdot at the time, finding the link is left as an exercise to the reader:-) Later, the servers were returned, but most of the above customers have already switched to other hosting firms to host their web sites. Al Jazeera was one of those.
Then, Ashcroft caused the Holy Land Fund assets to be frozen, claiming they are funding terrorism. A court battle wass underway to challenge that decision. Don't know what the status is right now.
Then the owners of Infocom (all of Palestinian origin, all Muslims) were personally charged for shipping computer parts to countries under embargo, so they are put out of business
This is the background that leads to, and keeps, the.iq TLD in limbo.
Have you not being reading the news lately? Or are you intentionally ignoring them?
The Coalition Provincial Authority cannot account for a few billion dollars worth of oil revenues since Iraq resumed production right after the invasion.
This new info on those couple brings me painful memories about a company that I'd rather not name, to protect the innocent.
There are often those people who are corporate mercenaries, who are not motivated by any sort of principals or any sort of caring for the company, its customers, or its employees.
They just keep going from one company to the other leaving ruin in their wake, whether it is staff cuts, cutting R&D, exiting certain markets,...etc.
They often hide behind a facade of a "new fad" in management style, and try to "change the company culture", and other nice slogans.
In reality, they only want the stock to rise at any cost, or for some other company to acquire their present one.
Crooks are no longer mafia style thugs in night clubs or gambling joints. They are in the boardroom, wearing suits and talking nice.
McBride is just another one of those, and not hte first nor the last.
I think that looking at anything in oversimplistic terms, black-vs-white, good-vs-evil ("They hate the USA because they hate freedom") is often a mistake.
The world is a complex place, and only simple minds need simple categorizations.
For those who try to probe and think and then come to a conclusion.
Having said that, there are things that Sun did that makes it not popular with the Open Source community. Their recent agreement with Microsoft to drop the law suits and settle for some money is seen as a sell out.
Also, the conflicting messages about hardware will become free, yet they want to open source Solaris seem to add to the confusion, to say the least. Also the mixed signals on open sourcing Java adds to the mele.
Sun used to be more liked in the UNIX and Open Source world, but their recent actions do not help at all with their fast sinking image.
IBM on the other hand is helping Open Source with their support for Linux in many areas. From funding development, to promoting Linux to customers,...etc. All this could be for their own selfish purposes, and not altruistic ones (remember they are a business, not a charity), but the result is more promotion and use of open source.
As for Microsoft, they are also a selfish business. What bothers us open source advocates is that the techniques they use (monopoly, exclusive licensing, killing off competition by giving away equivalent products for free and bundled with their OS which was exclusively licensed in the first place, closed file formats and APIs that keep changing, insecure products,...etc). They leave little to be liked.
So, let us not be bigots and paint this company as "evil" and the other as "good". Let us remember that today's ally can be tomorrow's foe. This is life, and things change. Let us look at the facts and then come to conclusions, taking both the present and the past into account, and not just one or the other.
Around 1998 or so (I could be wrong on the exact year), NCR Corp had a very similar concept called The Virtual Branch.
Granted, it did not have pop corn and kid play zone, but it was too close to what this article is saying.
The idea is to have a branch without real people serving customer in it. It would all be ATMs, Kiosks and Video links to a call center.
Of course NCR being an ATM and Kiosk company with strong presence in the financial industry, it made sense to propose such a setup, since it meant more sales of the products they make.
Mod my down if you want to do so, because I am about to complain about submission rejection, but for all I care, the editors are not looking carefully at submissions.
I submitted this at lunch time yesterday (that is about 24 hours ago!), as "Bob Bemer, inventor of ASCII, dead at 84", and included a link to Bob Bemer's web page, and some of the things he said helped create, like:
helped create COBOL
coined the words COBOL and CODASYL
invented the ESCape sequence
created the PICTURE clause
helped create and standardize the ASCII character set
put the backslash into the ASCII set
helped create the 8-bit per byte standard
The interesting part in my submission wa how some media covered it. A radio station here (Toronto) said: like "made computers understand letters in addition to numbers" (reference to ASCII) and that he invented "the escape key".
Some of the miswording for the non-tech media can be found in Washington Post article that says: "who helped invent the language used by most of the world's computers to translate text to numbers", and "He helped create the standard measurement of eight bits per byte" and "... escape sequence, which allows a computer to break from one language and enter another".
The Register covers his death with an ASCI Art figure. How appropriate.
It is sad that some Americans are so ignorant of history, or conveniently forget parts of it. Then again, this is human nature and not specifically American, but educated and informed people should know better.
France was a world power for a long time, both before the French Revolution, and after that (Napoleon,...etc.)
They were a colonial power too, check how many countries in the world have French as the official language.
The French were allies and supporters of the American Revolution against the then hated British.
Look up Lafayette and de Grasse some time. Also, while we are at it, check who made the Statue of Liberty as well.
I work for a Fortune 500 company who is a supplier of information technology.
I was told that the entire company's list of email addresses was taken and sold by a sysadmin a few years ago.
Granted, this is not an ISP, and they are not millions, but still a lot of addresses, same cause.
Compare Corporate to Political Think Tanks
on
When Think Tanks Attack
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I can't help but compare the Corporate funded think tanks to the Political ones.
For example, this article is about how big entrenched businesses (Microsoft is the one here) find shills to lobby its cause with the decision makers in business (IT) and government, in order to protect its interests.
Compare that to the neo-con think tanks (Project for New American Century, Rand Corp,...etc.), and how they put out reports on terrorism, foreign policy, international affairs,...etc.
A dangerous alliance.
The difference I see is that in the political scene, it is the tanks that drive the administration, while in the software/IT scene, it is corporations who drive the think tanks. Also, the danger of the political scene is far more reaching across the world and the future of civilization as we know it.
5. Import/Export filters. There are third party filters already, it would be nice if they were built in. Import.mbox, maildirs, Outlook PST, Outlook Express directories, Eudora, MacOS Mail.app, etc...
Actually, it already does some of that. I switched from Outlook Express to Thunderbird 0.6 a few days ago, and it automatically imported all of my email, and stored in mbox format. It was flawless. The only comment I have is that they use CRLF as the line delimited, not just LF. But, being the Windows version, that is understandable.
Very interesting. I may have thought of the concept informally, but did not know that someone like Chomsky has codified it into a doctrine. Thanks for the info.
I liken it to the Jedi hand wave: "these are not the droids you are looking for!"
The same doctrine applies to politics (specially foreign policy for superpowers / empires), as well as to multinational corporations.
Time and again we have seen the lies: this corporation is now "focusing on its core business", or "avoiding the mistakes of the past", or "cutting costs to improve the bottom line", and all of that is presented as "now we have a new way of doing things". This may be accompanied by other actions, such as a new logo, a new slogan,... etc.
But in reality, it is all the same sh*t on a different day (SSDD), repackaged in an attempt to make it not recognizable.
It would be very interesting to do research on how Britain got news about what happened overseas in its colonies.
For example, was it an "Indian Mutiny" or a "War of Independance" in 1857? (See
Or, was Kitchener of Khartoum a great national hero, or a staunch imperialist chauvinist?
Or, how Thomas Carlyle gradual decline from an iconoclastic liberal to a racist supporting slavery in his essay: "An Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question".
Reading about all this from the time it happened, without the 20/20 hindsight of later research.
Lots of revisionism will ensue. I hope it is of the good kind [factual research challenging entrenched notions], and not the bad kind [pseudoresearch biased by preconceived ideas.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem that Islamic countries in general have is not that they have stopped being inventive
Up to here, I basically agree.
but that strict prohibition of usury makes it difficult to create the kind of economy that we know in the west. Much of todays technological innovation requires big bucks to bring it to market, and it's hard to start up a technological firm without borrowing money.
Here you (perhaps unintentionally) oversimplify.
The prohibition on usury (normally charging interest, or more than the capital) does not mean that borrowing is prohibited, nor that borrowing is the only avenue for financing.
Islamic economics is based on things different from Western economy as we know it today.
Both parties in a partnership contract share the risk. This is in contrast with Western economy where the risk is avoided by being transferred to the other party. This is seen as unfair.
Partners share the assets and equity. Western society has a large portion of it based on debts. Also, there are derivatives which are basically speculative and more akin to gambling than finance and investment.
So, think about venture capital where the lender co-owns your invention, rather than just borrowing money from a bank who bases their income on debts of others.
Oh Boy. Where would one start ...
You are confusing many things here: Arab vs. Muslim vs. Middle Eastern vs. Afghan. Other posters have refuted this one sufficiently, but it only goes to show how well America understands the rest of the world, when an Afghan is termed "Arab" not by one, but two people who are in a position to know better.
This is just like lumping together American Evangelicals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Solomon Islands' Mormons, and Filipino Catholics all as "Christian" and making them an enemy or something.
You are also mixing up eras, and drawing blanket judgements.
Arab culture hasn't contributed shit to the world for the past several centuries.
Perhaps nothing global in scale, but the culture itself is very alive in literature, poetry, and other areas. You do not hear about it because it is not in your own language or in your field(s) of interest.
Lookup Nobel prize winners: Naguib Mahfouz (Literature), Ahmed Zewail (Chemistry), Elias James Corey (Chemistry), Peter Brian Medawar (Medicine) and Ferid Mourad (Medicine). Some are Christians and some are Muslims, but all are Arabs.
Also, what did (say) Iceland, India, China , ...etc. contribute in the last several centuries? Not as much as Western Europe or its daughter cutlures (America, ...etc)
My point then is that the parent poster wasn't too far off in implying that Arab culture has added little to the world besides some (admittedly very useful) math hundreds of years ago.
You need to check other fields too, such as Avicenna and Al Razi in medicine, Avicenna, Al Farabi, Avempace, Abubacer, Averroes in Philosophy. Alhazen in optics, Al Tusi in Astronomy, Gaber Ibn Hayyan and Maslama Al Majriti (Madrid) in Chemistry and others in various fields too many to list here (Google for Muslim Science or Islamic History of Science).
The point is, every civilization has a golden age: Ancient Egypt had theirs early on, Greece and Rome had theirs later. The Muslim world had that after. Now it is the age of Western Europe, and its daughters.
Civilization does not belong to one people exclusively, and not others. It is an all-human thing. Some contribute less now, but more later, and vice versa. Civilization is an accumulation of knowledge over millenia from various cultures.
Do some Googling again: Lookup Dr. George Saliba specifically and his writings on Islamic contributions to Science. His conclusion? The European Rennaisance could not have happened without Muslim works in Science, and the borrowing continued well into the 17th century.
Now, when you say things like:
They couldn't even get their own oil out of the ground if it wasn't for western engineers and equipment.
Much of middle east/arab culture is clearly diseased.
Only by shedding it and adopting lessons from people more advanced then them in science, organization or particular skills can they hope to once again contribute to civilization.
Some cultures are better than others.
Western civilization is clearly superior to the Arabic/Islamic subcultures that supply anti-US terrorists. Don't believe me? Think I'm prejudice? Go ahead and come up with something that the Arab world does better than the western world in modern history.
All this stems from a colonial mentality of "civilize the savages".
Why? Because the middle east has largely been ruled by dogmatic, corrupt and brutal dictors or otherwise severly backwards regimes for the past several centuries.
Here, you have a point, and a start of a good diagnosis of what is wrong there.
Let us do some digging: Almost all the Arab and Muslim countries were under colonial rule since the mid 19th century or so. During World War I, the Arabs sided with the British against the Ottomans, and were promised independance and a state. That did not happen. After World War II, military coupes starting popping up all the place (much like Africa and a large portion of Latin America). These gave rise to military dictatorships, much of them are present now across the region. These are very repressive and do not tolerate any form of dissent (think about how Saddam was, and you get the idea).
It wasn't safe to be a Jew in Muslim Spain either. The philosopher Moses Maimonides had to flee Spain to avoid attempts to convert him by force. He fled to Cairo (1159) where he became head of the Jewish community in Egypt.
So, another Muslim country (Egypt) gave refuge to the Jewish sage/philosopher. That says a lot I think: that not all Arab countries were the same, and that many were tolerant. Remember where the Jews who were expelled from Spain and Portugal went? Many ended up in the Ottoman Empire.
Also, your conclusion that is was not safe for Jews in Spain in not correct. There were lots of Jews in Muslim Spain, the most famous is Ha-Nagid and his father, who were ministers to the Muslim rulers.
because if something's already in the Koran, there's no need to say it again, and if it isn't, then it's false and mustn't be said
Is that your own conclusion or you have a reference for that? The only quote similar to this one is an apocryphal tale about the Caliph Omar alleged burning of the Library of Alexandria (that is about 4 centuries before Ibn Sina (Avicenna). Modern research shows that this tale is not true.
See (eg.) Huff, The Rise of Early Modern Science
Toby Huff is somewhat prejudiced, to say the least. Google some time for Dr. George Saliba's replies to his "research".
You are right.
Even the word UNIX is not exclusively for the operating system we all know and love (or hate!)
When NCR was part of AT&T, I was one day called by my manager because he was alerted that some company selling "pesticides" was using UNIX as a trademark to its product.
Turns out that UNIX was trademarked by some French fungicide company, as Dennis Ritchie has detailed.
Trademarks can be "duplicated" across product boundaries.
In Canada's Wonderland, north of Toronto, any and all cans of soda/pop are not premitted at the metal detectors.
You either have to return them to the car, or discard them on the spot. No exceptions.
This is not related to GPS nor phone.
Second, the US-backed forces in Afghanistan in the '80s largely preceeded the Taliban, which is mostly a Pakistani export.
You are partially right here. The Taliban came into being in the mid 1990s.
However, they are not mostly Pakistani export. They are a reaction to what happened over the decades of foreign invasion, international neglect, civil war, insecurity, ...etc.
After the USSR pulled out of Afghanistan, the US (and the rest of the world) lost interest. The Mujaheddin who fought the Soviets and successfully drove them out formed a week government. The various factions started fighting among themselves, and in 5 years (I think 1990 to 1995) more than 50,000 civilians died in Kabul alone because of the fighting.
The factions included many warlords who were later part of the Northen Alliance, and who are now in power. Among them are General Abdul Rasheed Dostum (Uzbek Communist), Ahmad Shah Masood (who was killed prior to the US invasion shortly after 9/11), Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (currently a fujitive wanted by the USA), Rabbani (ex-president), ...etc.
Apart from the fighting, there were looting, rape, and general insecurity.
Afghan people at the time were disillusioned by all that is going on, how can they manage to drive out the USSR, but then fail miserably and turn against each other?
Some religious students living in refugee camps formed militias to fight the thiefs, extortionists, ...etc. This developed into the Taliban as we knew them.
They were supported by certain elements in Pakistan (where they spent a lot of their youth, in refugee camps), but I would not call them mostly a Pakistani export just because of that.
Sounds like a faster rescue without the need for a CD.
Have you tried this yourself?
I am curious about filesystems being mounted and such when you do this.
Just found out that the jury are to rule in this case real soon now.
Dallas Star Telegram article on this.
Thanks for replying.
There are clear differences between the two cases: the EU may be missing some money under its own control. This happens in many governments, passively, or actively. Passively due to lack of accountability, or actively because of corruption, embezzelment, ... etc. In Canada, there was the HRDC scandal a few years back. That part is normal.
However, in Iraq, the situation is different: The US has actively sought to occupy an oil rich country at a time where world oil reserves are limited or declining. Iraq's oil production was very limited for 12 years after the UN sanctions spearheaded by USA and UK. Once the country was occupied, oil wells and pipelines were operating at full capacity again within weeks.
The funds were supposed to go to a fund. That fund was controlled by the US CPA. The US Administration keeps asking Congress for more money to stay there (was it 4 billion a month?). Both Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz never wanted to pin down a figure when pressured to come up with one. It would be really convenient to get hold of some of that money, and not have to beg the Congress for money every now and then. Or, you can compare that with the Iran-Contra scandal: The Pentagon and/or the Administration get money under the table and funnel it under the table.
This is to say nothing about Cheney, Halliburton, et al, which are motivated by greed, and are a major supporter of this war, out of financial gain.
I think this goes far beyond a simple misplacement of funds.
This is the same company that at one time hosted many Arab or Muslim web sites, including:
And other sites too.
Just before September 11, 2001, the FBI confiscated the servers that hosted all those sites, causing them to go offline for days. This was covered on Slashdot at the time, finding the link is left as an exercise to the reader :-) Later, the servers were returned, but most of the above customers have already switched to other hosting firms to host their web sites. Al Jazeera was one of those.
Then, Ashcroft caused the Holy Land Fund assets to be frozen, claiming they are funding terrorism. A court battle wass underway to challenge that decision. Don't know what the status is right now.
Then the owners of Infocom (all of Palestinian origin, all Muslims) were personally charged for shipping computer parts to countries under embargo, so they are put out of business
This is the background that leads to, and keeps, the .iq TLD in limbo.
Here are some articles:
Have you not being reading the news lately? Or are you intentionally ignoring them?
The Coalition Provincial Authority cannot account for a few billion dollars worth of oil revenues since Iraq resumed production right after the invasion.
Michael Moore did not invent that ...
This new info on those couple brings me painful memories about a company that I'd rather not name, to protect the innocent.
There are often those people who are corporate mercenaries, who are not motivated by any sort of principals or any sort of caring for the company, its customers, or its employees.
They just keep going from one company to the other leaving ruin in their wake, whether it is staff cuts, cutting R&D, exiting certain markets, ...etc.
They often hide behind a facade of a "new fad" in management style, and try to "change the company culture", and other nice slogans.
In reality, they only want the stock to rise at any cost, or for some other company to acquire their present one.
Crooks are no longer mafia style thugs in night clubs or gambling joints. They are in the boardroom, wearing suits and talking nice.
McBride is just another one of those, and not hte first nor the last.
I think that looking at anything in oversimplistic terms, black-vs-white, good-vs-evil ("They hate the USA because they hate freedom") is often a mistake.
The world is a complex place, and only simple minds need simple categorizations.
For those who try to probe and think and then come to a conclusion.
Having said that, there are things that Sun did that makes it not popular with the Open Source community. Their recent agreement with Microsoft to drop the law suits and settle for some money is seen as a sell out.
Also, the conflicting messages about hardware will become free, yet they want to open source Solaris seem to add to the confusion, to say the least. Also the mixed signals on open sourcing Java adds to the mele.
Sun used to be more liked in the UNIX and Open Source world, but their recent actions do not help at all with their fast sinking image.
IBM on the other hand is helping Open Source with their support for Linux in many areas. From funding development, to promoting Linux to customers, ...etc. All this could be for their own selfish purposes, and not altruistic ones (remember they are a business, not a charity), but the result is more promotion and use of open source.
As for Microsoft, they are also a selfish business. What bothers us open source advocates is that the techniques they use (monopoly, exclusive licensing, killing off competition by giving away equivalent products for free and bundled with their OS which was exclusively licensed in the first place, closed file formats and APIs that keep changing, insecure products, ...etc). They leave little to be liked.
So, let us not be bigots and paint this company as "evil" and the other as "good". Let us remember that today's ally can be tomorrow's foe. This is life, and things change. Let us look at the facts and then come to conclusions, taking both the present and the past into account, and not just one or the other.
Around 1998 or so (I could be wrong on the exact year), NCR Corp had a very similar concept called The Virtual Branch.
Granted, it did not have pop corn and kid play zone, but it was too close to what this article is saying.
The idea is to have a branch without real people serving customer in it. It would all be ATMs, Kiosks and Video links to a call center.
Of course NCR being an ATM and Kiosk company with strong presence in the financial industry, it made sense to propose such a setup, since it meant more sales of the products they make.
Mod my down if you want to do so, because I am about to complain about submission rejection, but for all I care, the editors are not looking carefully at submissions.
I submitted this at lunch time yesterday (that is about 24 hours ago!), as "Bob Bemer, inventor of ASCII, dead at 84", and included a link to Bob Bemer's web page, and some of the things he said helped create, like:
The interesting part in my submission wa how some media covered it. A radio station here (Toronto) said: like "made computers understand letters in addition to numbers" (reference to ASCII) and that he invented "the escape key".
Some of the miswording for the non-tech media can be found in Washington Post article that says: "who helped invent the language used by most of the world's computers to translate text to numbers", and "He helped create the standard measurement of eight bits per byte" and "... escape sequence, which allows a computer to break from one language and enter another".
The Register covers his death with an ASCI Art figure. How appropriate.
Like some /.ers have already comments, I immediately thought of the MAC address being assigned and not an IP address.
What came to my mind is that it will be subcutaneous implant of a chip, to do so, perhaps RFID?
Very well said.
...etc.)
It is sad that some Americans are so ignorant of history, or conveniently forget parts of it. Then again, this is human nature and not specifically American, but educated and informed people should know better.
France was a world power for a long time, both before the French Revolution, and after that (Napoleon,
They were a colonial power too, check how many countries in the world have French as the official language.
The French were allies and supporters of the American Revolution against the then hated British.
Look up Lafayette and de Grasse some time. Also, while we are at it, check who made the Statue of Liberty as well.
I work for a Fortune 500 company who is a supplier of information technology.
I was told that the entire company's list of email addresses was taken and sold by a sysadmin a few years ago.
Granted, this is not an ISP, and they are not millions, but still a lot of addresses, same cause.
I can't help but compare the Corporate funded think tanks to the Political ones.
...etc.), and how they put out reports on terrorism, foreign policy, international affairs, ...etc.
For example, this article is about how big entrenched businesses (Microsoft is the one here) find shills to lobby its cause with the decision makers in business (IT) and government, in order to protect its interests.
Compare that to the neo-con think tanks (Project for New American Century, Rand Corp,
A dangerous alliance.
The difference I see is that in the political scene, it is the tanks that drive the administration, while in the software/IT scene, it is corporations who drive the think tanks. Also, the danger of the political scene is far more reaching across the world and the future of civilization as we know it.
5. Import/Export filters. There are third party filters already, it would be nice if they were built in. Import .mbox, maildirs, Outlook PST, Outlook Express directories, Eudora, MacOS Mail.app, etc...
Actually, it already does some of that. I switched from Outlook Express to Thunderbird 0.6 a few days ago, and it automatically imported all of my email, and stored in mbox format. It was flawless. The only comment I have is that they use CRLF as the line delimited, not just LF. But, being the Windows version, that is understandable.
I guess they are now wondering what a Slashdotting sounds like?
Anyone wants to guess?
Very interesting. I may have thought of the concept informally, but did not know that someone like Chomsky has codified it into a doctrine. Thanks for the info.
I liken it to the Jedi hand wave: "these are not the droids you are looking for!"
The same doctrine applies to politics (specially foreign policy for superpowers / empires), as well as to multinational corporations.
Time and again we have seen the lies: this corporation is now "focusing on its core business", or "avoiding the mistakes of the past", or "cutting costs to improve the bottom line", and all of that is presented as "now we have a new way of doing things". This may be accompanied by other actions, such as a new logo, a new slogan, ... etc.
But in reality, it is all the same sh*t on a different day (SSDD), repackaged in an attempt to make it not recognizable.
I wholeheartedly agree with you.
The problem with those who repeat history's plunders (Dubya being the stark example now), are many, including:
Dubya seems to be doing all that in the most excellent way...
It would be very interesting to do research on how Britain got news about what happened overseas in its colonies.
For example, was it an "Indian Mutiny" or a "War of Independance" in 1857? (See
Or, was Kitchener of Khartoum a great national hero, or a staunch imperialist chauvinist?
Or, how Thomas Carlyle gradual decline from an iconoclastic liberal to a racist supporting slavery in his essay: "An Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question".
Reading about all this from the time it happened, without the 20/20 hindsight of later research.
Lots of revisionism will ensue. I hope it is of the good kind [factual research challenging entrenched notions], and not the bad kind [pseudoresearch biased by preconceived ideas.
Very interesting indeed.
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