So who is gonna invade Iran today? Iraq with Saddam gone for the last 8 years? Turkey? Afghanistan? Russian? Israel? Your argument just doesn't hold water I'm afraid. If Iran wanted to be stronger it would try and have better relations with arms producers (eg. Russia, France etc) and would be stronger. It is far better to have stronger conventional forces you can actual use rather than some hypothetical or actual nuke you can't - and the Iranians are smart enough to know this. Iran threatening Israel is a domestic ploy, distract your public with a bogeyman and you can get away with a lot of things (US, Russia, China etc also do this all the time to their own people).
Like one of the secret facilities they are so adept at keeping from the IAEA? There were new underground facilities being constructed that remained undetected for a long time. If these facilities were for civilian energy needs (perfectly legitimate IMHO) then why bury them and hide them from IAEA inspection (since the inspectors would easily be able to see they were for civilian use or not, which would confirm the sites as being for peaceful purposes).
Not quite the same. What are the actual limits on power of the Supreme Leader? What checks and balances are there to make sure the Supreme Leader follows the will of the people/democratic process? It appears while there might be some limits in theory in practice the Supreme Leader has the Pasdaran and Basiji to do whatever the hell he wants. Iran has the trappings of a democracy but in actual practice it is a very corrupt absolute theocracy. Which is a real shame since all the Iranians I meet I really like as generally intelligent, warm and humerous people.
Actually in one war Israel could see Egyptian preparations and launched a pre-emptive strike on the Egyptian airbases. The US did not like this and did not supply ammo. Israel learnt from this and developed its own arms industry as a result. Now their arms industry is more advanced in many areas than the US (who do you think designs the lasers, helmet-mounted sights, robots and even Intel CPUs that the US uses? thanks to their very high output of scientists). So, while you "Monroe Doctrine" approach sounds good it has been historically proven to not work, plus the US *loves* giving foreign aid (eg. weapon credits to buy US-made gear) to countries like Israel, which has far more to do with domestic US pork-barrel politics than geopolitics. If you took US domestic politics out of their foreign policy stances then there would be a *lot* less military stuff bought and sold round the world (which would also result in a lower inclination to use all that shiny stuff you just bought). So, a nice story from you, but a little short on facts or historical insight.
Israel has stated unspecified relation and the right to *self-defense*. This is a right recognized by the United Nations and by all countries party to it. When it talks about 'pre-emptive' self-defence it is on shakier moral ground, but most pragmatists can see that it is necessary. However, there is a *huge* difference between stating that you will 'wipe' a country off the face of the Earth (Iran's *published* position) and the target of that threat stating they will remove that capability before it comes to pass (Israel's published position). These are published facts. I'm afraid if you can't see the difference in those positions and how the second position is a logical (and reasonable) reaction to the first then I'm afraid you need to do a lot more homework. You would also benefit from thinking about what would be a reasonable response if someone vowed to kill *you personally* and spent decades of effort and money trying to make it so. Turning the other cheek had been tried and failed miserably every time (incidentally, the US also had a policy of isolationism for a century, called the 'Monroe Doctrine' but found that trouble came to them if they did proactively try and neutralize it first)
Facts please. When did Israel threaten another country with nukes? They don't even acknowledge they have them. They do say that if Syria attacks them with chemical weapons (a capability Syria is known to have and is ready to use) that there will be "consequences" as a defensive measure. Israel is not perfect, not by a long way, but please recognize your statement doesn't correlate with the known facts. Face it, you are starting from an anti-Israeli position and selectively choose what you would like to believe - rather than trying to see the rights and wrongs that all sides make and *then* seeing what is the path of least badness (which is Iran to not have nukes in this case).
Whateverz. Facts: srael has never threatened to destroy Iran and recognizes Iran as a legitimate country. Iran does not recognize Israel as legitimate and *routinely* threatens to "wipe the Zionist Entity from the face of the Earth". Iran with bombs is not a direct danger. There are so many factions within the Iranian government there is a decent chance that if they had nukes that they would make their way to either Hezbollah or Hamas - either of which is crazy enough to use them. This gives 'plaustible deniability' to the Iranians. Better to stop it before it gets to that stage - which is what the rest of the Reasoning World realizes and geopolitical n00bs like you fail to realize.
While readers are good for teaching people to read, laptops have the massive advantage that people can learn to create stuff. Doesn't matter whether it is code, blogs, videos, art, spreadsheets, science, whatever. Far better for users to have the opportunity to be 'creators' and not just 'consumers'. Even though the vast majority of sheeple in the West consume only (which is ok, not everyone can or wants to create) it is the creators who drive innovation and progress (even if it is only a little website for their hobby). IMHOm it is far better for the developing world to also have this opportunity via cheap laptops, than be stuck in a read-only world.
And as for your weak ad-hominem attempt. No, I'm not a soldier (although once I trained as an Air Force pilot for a neutral country very far from the Middle East). In Lebanon I did met Hezbollah fighters overlooking the border (I had an open mind meeting them, but found in my personal opinion they were arseholes to my friend's wife). I also met many Israeli civilians, soldiers and security personal (who do it for a job, or national service - but it is not their reason for existence). There was a huge difference there between those who want themselves and others to live a good life (the Israelis) and those whose single purpose was to destroy others (Hezbullah). Pretty obvious if you think about it with regards to the facts and demonstrable history, but sadly you appear not to have analyzed this rationally.
"Act of war"? I suggest you read the maifesto of Hezb Allah or th Iranian Revolutionary Government. They have repeatedly stated their aim is to destroy the "Zionist entity" by any means possible - that is, effectively declared war. Go ahead, read their pronouncements (especially the ones originally not in English), I'll wait. You might stop being so naiively prissy about who declares or doesn't declare what on whom. The Middle East is the "Wild West" at the moment, yet many in the West seem to be pretty ignorant about the *real* positions of each party (nb. I've been to a lot of the countries in the region, non are saints, but some are far worse than others).
Java Webstart applications can be run in the browser or on the desktop (at around twice the startup speed, in my experience). The Webstart technology handles versioning updates, and just about everyone already has a modern version of Java installed already and the Java quickstarter installed. Shame such technology is no longer fashionable as it solves many problems that lots of other tech is trying to get to (Flash, Javascript etc). Java Webstart is not perfect but it is pretty good for interactive web apps that exceed the simpler stuff that Javascript is (very) good at.
If you haven't given it a go yet then I would suggest researching the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) if you are doing any web stuff. Beats doing JavaScript by hand or most JavaScript libraries. Eclipse (and NetBeans) has a plugin for GWT that is quite nice. If you are doing anything complex it can be quite good to use a full-featured debugger to sort out a web GUI.
Netbeans uses Swing which is on Java2D which has been fully hardware accelerated since Java 1.6.0_u10. Netbeans can be a little sluggish when working hard on stuff sometimes but it is certainly a lot faster than it used to be. As you point out Netbeans pretty much works out of the box compared to the morass that is the World of Eclipse plugins. If you haven't tries Netbeans lately it might be worth you checking it out as your opinion might change (and NetBeans 7.0, currently in Beta, has some nifty changes too).
Average income is fine within the sample, it is a crap measure when comparing between different populations - as readers are almost certainly going to do by comparing the income vs. that of their own country or their own income. Just lettin' folks know the figures have to be treated with caution - in the reader's mind they should always be qualified/tagged with the conditions they were calculated for.
Well, it turns out that several months ago an Australian actors' union (lead by a guy called Simon Whipp) tried to muscle in on the New Zealand scene and caused a lot of problems for the production. Jackson was involved in the resulting cat-fight, and no-one (including Jackson) came out looking like a saint (although some looked worse than others). The problem was resolved by the NZ Government stepping in, modifying some laws and promising greater assistance for the film. Cynics have a small NZ industry dispute being inflated to the benefit of large Hollywood studios (who made noises about moving the film elsewhere - which ultimately ensured they received a beneficial outcome).
This was what passes for major news in New Zealand, since we don't have too much other bad stuff going at that time (dislaimer: I'm from New Zealand).
Average income is a poor measure (brought down by non-working youth, elderly and unemployed). Median income is better, and is around $NZ 38 k IIRC (disclaimer: I'm from New Zealand). If we get selective and choose "median income of the working population" I think it goes up to around $NZ 45 k. So the figure you get depends on whether you take median or mean, and which population you use for your sample (make sure when doing comparisons with other countries that you are using the same 'statistics', or the comparison becomes less accurate).
> Cross platform user interfaces are a stupid idea that only programmers could have come up with (I'm saying that as a programmer myself). That just doesn't make any sense at all.
This makes no sense whatsoever. Just because you might not be able to construct a good user interface doesn't mean others can't (not just "rich clients", but "filthy rich clients" can and are cross-platform, efficient, and intuitive to use - if you know what you are doing).
One of the greatest things of UNIX was that it was designed to be machine-neutral as much as possible. That meant you would have this common framework that would be available anywhere and everywhere.
The C programming language was designed with the same platform-abstracting ideas in mind. Unfortunately later C libraries (past those of ANSI/ISO C) started becoming more and more platform specific (mostly as a result of vendors either doing it "their way" or deliberately tying people to their platform). Later on, Java would grow for the same reason again, but with far more extensive standardized libraries covering what people wanted to do in the Internet Age (sockets, HTTP, multi-threading, platform-independent GUI [Swing with Nimbus looks great and performs well ever since rendering was fully hardware accelerated in 1.6.0_u10]).
Unfortunately we're at the stage where vendors are seeking to close things out again. Apple makes wonderful hardware but their walled garden approach is counterproductive from a global industry perspective (and why they will arguably 'fail' to set the standards for software a second time around, for the same reasons, but will make a colossal amount of money anyway). Google's Android is better, but is still a little bit of a walled garden. Hopefully innovation in profit will move elsewhere ('standardization' of one sort or another eventually comes to almost all technologies) and allow things to settle down in the phone space - and allow the cross-platform ideals of UNIX to once again return. One day I hope that phones are sufficiently powerful (processing and energy/battery life) that developing for them is as simple as for the embedded, desktop and server spaces (which have specialized libraries but are essentially the same these days [if you are using Java]).
Hell, I was detained by being a single guy who had recently passed through Syria. I then had to wait for a couple of hours while they ran an Interpol check on me. This is despite me being a white fella from New Zealand (the closest we get to exporting terrorism is the hordes of drunk teens who go on their 'overseas experience').
Don't forget Britain and Spain. They had bombings that killed a lot of people on trains and buses, and managed to get on with life too (after suitable mourning, and some additional measures were put in place, although the UK police did kill a Brazillian overstayer out of paranoia).
I was an officer in an Air Force. Part of our officer schooling emphasized that we could challenge what we perceived to be an unlawful order. We could do this twice, and after that we *had to* comply. Afterwards, if it hit the fan the fact that we challenged the order but were then compelled to comply could be used as a defense. Of course, in a court martial situation the tribunal could always find you guilty of something if they wanted to ("conduct prejudicial to service discipline" was a handy one that could be used for anything). Mostly though you were expected to challenge unlawful orders and had a decent chance of not-performing them if you convinced the issuing officer that it was indeed unlawful (part of the officer training also involved considering contributing points-of-view before issuing a final decision).
Some hate each other. The majority of Israelis I met don't hate the Palestinians - apart from extremists the Israelis mostly want a good life and for the Palestinians to leave them the hell alone. Most would be very happy with a Two State solution, but setting it up has to bring peace. However, the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza showed that conceding land for peace does not work - hence a great deal of mistrust now (even from former doves and moderates).
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So who is gonna invade Iran today? Iraq with Saddam gone for the last 8 years? Turkey? Afghanistan? Russian? Israel? Your argument just doesn't hold water I'm afraid. If Iran wanted to be stronger it would try and have better relations with arms producers (eg. Russia, France etc) and would be stronger. It is far better to have stronger conventional forces you can actual use rather than some hypothetical or actual nuke you can't - and the Iranians are smart enough to know this. Iran threatening Israel is a domestic ploy, distract your public with a bogeyman and you can get away with a lot of things (US, Russia, China etc also do this all the time to their own people).
Like one of the secret facilities they are so adept at keeping from the IAEA? There were new underground facilities being constructed that remained undetected for a long time. If these facilities were for civilian energy needs (perfectly legitimate IMHO) then why bury them and hide them from IAEA inspection (since the inspectors would easily be able to see they were for civilian use or not, which would confirm the sites as being for peaceful purposes).
Not quite the same. What are the actual limits on power of the Supreme Leader? What checks and balances are there to make sure the Supreme Leader follows the will of the people/democratic process? It appears while there might be some limits in theory in practice the Supreme Leader has the Pasdaran and Basiji to do whatever the hell he wants. Iran has the trappings of a democracy but in actual practice it is a very corrupt absolute theocracy. Which is a real shame since all the Iranians I meet I really like as generally intelligent, warm and humerous people.
Actually in one war Israel could see Egyptian preparations and launched a pre-emptive strike on the Egyptian airbases. The US did not like this and did not supply ammo. Israel learnt from this and developed its own arms industry as a result. Now their arms industry is more advanced in many areas than the US (who do you think designs the lasers, helmet-mounted sights, robots and even Intel CPUs that the US uses? thanks to their very high output of scientists). So, while you "Monroe Doctrine" approach sounds good it has been historically proven to not work, plus the US *loves* giving foreign aid (eg. weapon credits to buy US-made gear) to countries like Israel, which has far more to do with domestic US pork-barrel politics than geopolitics. If you took US domestic politics out of their foreign policy stances then there would be a *lot* less military stuff bought and sold round the world (which would also result in a lower inclination to use all that shiny stuff you just bought). So, a nice story from you, but a little short on facts or historical insight.
Israel has stated unspecified relation and the right to *self-defense*. This is a right recognized by the United Nations and by all countries party to it. When it talks about 'pre-emptive' self-defence it is on shakier moral ground, but most pragmatists can see that it is necessary. However, there is a *huge* difference between stating that you will 'wipe' a country off the face of the Earth (Iran's *published* position) and the target of that threat stating they will remove that capability before it comes to pass (Israel's published position). These are published facts. I'm afraid if you can't see the difference in those positions and how the second position is a logical (and reasonable) reaction to the first then I'm afraid you need to do a lot more homework. You would also benefit from thinking about what would be a reasonable response if someone vowed to kill *you personally* and spent decades of effort and money trying to make it so. Turning the other cheek had been tried and failed miserably every time (incidentally, the US also had a policy of isolationism for a century, called the 'Monroe Doctrine' but found that trouble came to them if they did proactively try and neutralize it first)
Facts please. When did Israel threaten another country with nukes? They don't even acknowledge they have them. They do say that if Syria attacks them with chemical weapons (a capability Syria is known to have and is ready to use) that there will be "consequences" as a defensive measure. Israel is not perfect, not by a long way, but please recognize your statement doesn't correlate with the known facts. Face it, you are starting from an anti-Israeli position and selectively choose what you would like to believe - rather than trying to see the rights and wrongs that all sides make and *then* seeing what is the path of least badness (which is Iran to not have nukes in this case).
Whateverz. Facts: srael has never threatened to destroy Iran and recognizes Iran as a legitimate country. Iran does not recognize Israel as legitimate and *routinely* threatens to "wipe the Zionist Entity from the face of the Earth". Iran with bombs is not a direct danger. There are so many factions within the Iranian government there is a decent chance that if they had nukes that they would make their way to either Hezbollah or Hamas - either of which is crazy enough to use them. This gives 'plaustible deniability' to the Iranians. Better to stop it before it gets to that stage - which is what the rest of the Reasoning World realizes and geopolitical n00bs like you fail to realize.
You do know that Mac OS X uses CUPS underneath right? The same printing software as Linux.
While readers are good for teaching people to read, laptops have the massive advantage that people can learn to create stuff. Doesn't matter whether it is code, blogs, videos, art, spreadsheets, science, whatever. Far better for users to have the opportunity to be 'creators' and not just 'consumers'. Even though the vast majority of sheeple in the West consume only (which is ok, not everyone can or wants to create) it is the creators who drive innovation and progress (even if it is only a little website for their hobby). IMHOm it is far better for the developing world to also have this opportunity via cheap laptops, than be stuck in a read-only world.
Please read the following, with as open mind as you can and follow the citations therein (probably impossible for someone such as yourself who appears to have formed a fixed opinion based on selecting only the out-of-date statements that favour your pre-made opinion)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology_of_Hezbollah#Attitudes.2C_statements.2C_and_actions_concerning_Israel_and_Zionism
And as for your weak ad-hominem attempt. No, I'm not a soldier (although once I trained as an Air Force pilot for a neutral country very far from the Middle East). In Lebanon I did met Hezbollah fighters overlooking the border (I had an open mind meeting them, but found in my personal opinion they were arseholes to my friend's wife). I also met many Israeli civilians, soldiers and security personal (who do it for a job, or national service - but it is not their reason for existence). There was a huge difference there between those who want themselves and others to live a good life (the Israelis) and those whose single purpose was to destroy others (Hezbullah). Pretty obvious if you think about it with regards to the facts and demonstrable history, but sadly you appear not to have analyzed this rationally.
"Act of war"? I suggest you read the maifesto of Hezb Allah or th Iranian Revolutionary Government. They have repeatedly stated their aim is to destroy the "Zionist entity" by any means possible - that is, effectively declared war. Go ahead, read their pronouncements (especially the ones originally not in English), I'll wait. You might stop being so naiively prissy about who declares or doesn't declare what on whom. The Middle East is the "Wild West" at the moment, yet many in the West seem to be pretty ignorant about the *real* positions of each party (nb. I've been to a lot of the countries in the region, non are saints, but some are far worse than others).
Not the only one to notice, but the first to comment. Thanks for pointing it out, hopefully an editor will revise the summary.
Java Webstart applications can be run in the browser or on the desktop (at around twice the startup speed, in my experience). The Webstart technology handles versioning updates, and just about everyone already has a modern version of Java installed already and the Java quickstarter installed. Shame such technology is no longer fashionable as it solves many problems that lots of other tech is trying to get to (Flash, Javascript etc). Java Webstart is not perfect but it is pretty good for interactive web apps that exceed the simpler stuff that Javascript is (very) good at.
If you haven't given it a go yet then I would suggest researching the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) if you are doing any web stuff. Beats doing JavaScript by hand or most JavaScript libraries. Eclipse (and NetBeans) has a plugin for GWT that is quite nice. If you are doing anything complex it can be quite good to use a full-featured debugger to sort out a web GUI.
Netbeans uses Swing which is on Java2D which has been fully hardware accelerated since Java 1.6.0_u10. Netbeans can be a little sluggish when working hard on stuff sometimes but it is certainly a lot faster than it used to be. As you point out Netbeans pretty much works out of the box compared to the morass that is the World of Eclipse plugins. If you haven't tries Netbeans lately it might be worth you checking it out as your opinion might change (and NetBeans 7.0, currently in Beta, has some nifty changes too).
Average income is fine within the sample, it is a crap measure when comparing between different populations - as readers are almost certainly going to do by comparing the income vs. that of their own country or their own income. Just lettin' folks know the figures have to be treated with caution - in the reader's mind they should always be qualified/tagged with the conditions they were calculated for.
Well, it turns out that several months ago an Australian actors' union (lead by a guy called Simon Whipp) tried to muscle in on the New Zealand scene and caused a lot of problems for the production. Jackson was involved in the resulting cat-fight, and no-one (including Jackson) came out looking like a saint (although some looked worse than others). The problem was resolved by the NZ Government stepping in, modifying some laws and promising greater assistance for the film. Cynics have a small NZ industry dispute being inflated to the benefit of large Hollywood studios (who made noises about moving the film elsewhere - which ultimately ensured they received a beneficial outcome).
This was what passes for major news in New Zealand, since we don't have too much other bad stuff going at that time (dislaimer: I'm from New Zealand).
Here is some of the reporting of the bitch-fighting that went on (go forth Slashdotters, melt that server to molten slag!):
http://www.onfilm.co.nz/2010/10/27/peter-jackson-statement-re-actors-equity-the-hobbit-i-was-never-asked-for-a-meeting-not-without-a-gun-to-my-head-2/
Average income is a poor measure (brought down by non-working youth, elderly and unemployed). Median income is better, and is around $NZ 38 k IIRC (disclaimer: I'm from New Zealand). If we get selective and choose "median income of the working population" I think it goes up to around $NZ 45 k. So the figure you get depends on whether you take median or mean, and which population you use for your sample (make sure when doing comparisons with other countries that you are using the same 'statistics', or the comparison becomes less accurate).
> Cross platform user interfaces are a stupid idea that only programmers could have come up with (I'm saying that as a programmer myself). That just doesn't make any sense at all.
This makes no sense whatsoever. Just because you might not be able to construct a good user interface doesn't mean others can't (not just "rich clients", but "filthy rich clients" can and are cross-platform, efficient, and intuitive to use - if you know what you are doing).
One of the greatest things of UNIX was that it was designed to be machine-neutral as much as possible. That meant you would have this common framework that would be available anywhere and everywhere.
The C programming language was designed with the same platform-abstracting ideas in mind. Unfortunately later C libraries (past those of ANSI/ISO C) started becoming more and more platform specific (mostly as a result of vendors either doing it "their way" or deliberately tying people to their platform). Later on, Java would grow for the same reason again, but with far more extensive standardized libraries covering what people wanted to do in the Internet Age (sockets, HTTP, multi-threading, platform-independent GUI [Swing with Nimbus looks great and performs well ever since rendering was fully hardware accelerated in 1.6.0_u10]).
Unfortunately we're at the stage where vendors are seeking to close things out again. Apple makes wonderful hardware but their walled garden approach is counterproductive from a global industry perspective (and why they will arguably 'fail' to set the standards for software a second time around, for the same reasons, but will make a colossal amount of money anyway). Google's Android is better, but is still a little bit of a walled garden. Hopefully innovation in profit will move elsewhere ('standardization' of one sort or another eventually comes to almost all technologies) and allow things to settle down in the phone space - and allow the cross-platform ideals of UNIX to once again return. One day I hope that phones are sufficiently powerful (processing and energy/battery life) that developing for them is as simple as for the embedded, desktop and server spaces (which have specialized libraries but are essentially the same these days [if you are using Java]).
Hell, I was detained by being a single guy who had recently passed through Syria. I then had to wait for a couple of hours while they ran an Interpol check on me. This is despite me being a white fella from New Zealand (the closest we get to exporting terrorism is the hordes of drunk teens who go on their 'overseas experience').
Don't forget Britain and Spain. They had bombings that killed a lot of people on trains and buses, and managed to get on with life too (after suitable mourning, and some additional measures were put in place, although the UK police did kill a Brazillian overstayer out of paranoia).
Beslan School Massacre?
I was an officer in an Air Force. Part of our officer schooling emphasized that we could challenge what we perceived to be an unlawful order. We could do this twice, and after that we *had to* comply. Afterwards, if it hit the fan the fact that we challenged the order but were then compelled to comply could be used as a defense. Of course, in a court martial situation the tribunal could always find you guilty of something if they wanted to ("conduct prejudicial to service discipline" was a handy one that could be used for anything). Mostly though you were expected to challenge unlawful orders and had a decent chance of not-performing them if you convinced the issuing officer that it was indeed unlawful (part of the officer training also involved considering contributing points-of-view before issuing a final decision).
Some hate each other. The majority of Israelis I met don't hate the Palestinians - apart from extremists the Israelis mostly want a good life and for the Palestinians to leave them the hell alone. Most would be very happy with a Two State solution, but setting it up has to bring peace. However, the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza showed that conceding land for peace does not work - hence a great deal of mistrust now (even from former doves and moderates).