I would suggest either Somalia or Democratic Republic of Congo. Both are places where you can have your freedom, and where you can live tax free without government interference. I would suggest you bring a kalashnikov though.
But seriously, I've been living in Egypt for 2 years, although it's a corrupt dictatorship, as a foreigner it can work quite well. Bribes can get you almost anything if you do it right. And as a foreign passport holder, you are immune to arrest on most of the usual charges like running a blog or saying bad things about the King. If you can get work with Oracle or Microsoft, wages are comparable to the West. And living is cheap.
The infrastructure is crumbling though, and I'm sick of it. I could move into a gated compound, and hang out with expats and foreign-educated Egyptians, but that would bore me to death. If I wanted that, I'd move to Dubai. Which is a whole other bag of weird.
I live in a city of 20 million people, and it is a disaster. Constant gridlock over major bridges, massive pollution, no green space, mass traffic casualties, ambulances unable to reach the dead and the dying. I suspect that motor cars do no scale well to mega-cities, but there are other factors involved here, illiteracy, corruption, poverty, and mismanagement.
I am so looking forward to living in the town of the future. Cities are so 1999.
Iran has a multi-party democracy. Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. Iranian universities turn out scientists and engineers. Saudi universities tun out ideologues. Saudis were directly responsible for 9/11. Saudis execute adulterers without judicial review. Iran doesn't. Saudis export their extreme ideology across moderate Arab states. Iran doesn't.
Brains could be the reason why humans have such a hard time giving birth, and why human babies are born so helpless compared to other mammal young.
Think about sex. Peacocks with the biggest tails get more. The tails are big and heavy, but if you have the strength to carry it around, hens will want to have your babies. They've been down that evolutionary road for so many generations that their tails are huge.
I suspect there may be a similar trend at work with humans. Swap tails for brains.
I live in Egypt, and can buy either original or copied Adobe Software from most computer stores. The thing with this country is the police are too busy drinking tea and chasing opponents of the ruling party to bother about US companies interests. Though of course, seeing as how much US military aid the country gets, they could probably be "persuaded".
This isn't just a Microsoft issue. Part of the problem is hardware vendors shipping exotic hardware with sloppy software. I was setting up an HP server recently, and while the hardware RAID "just worked" with linux, you need to install HP's awful kernel module to be able to see the error status of the disks, fans, power supplies, and chasis temperature. No, they don't use plain old SMART and lm_sensors. The HP reporting program doesn't even work right in cron, the reports it generates have "press space to continue" in the reports. What's wrong with using a standard unix pager? Suspect it was a port from Windows. And to make it all worse, I remember some older versions of this which required you to run a certain kernel. So then you have a choice - know the status of your box, or run an old and vulnerable kernel. Yuck.
Hardware vendors, either document your fancy kit and allow it to work with generic and well established software, or provide decent software. No excuses.
Israel, which is for all intents and purposes Western? Have you ever tried to get a sandwich on a Saturday over there? Or tried to go to a wedding between a Jew and a Christian? Or arrange for an Arab to move into a Jewish neighbourhood? Not going to happen. The Israeli government always seems to want to prop up its parliamentary power with a smattering of extremist Jewish groups. This is how democratic coalitions work there. In return, these Jewish groups groups get to dictate laws on marriage, divorce, residency, citizenship, settlements, shabat openings, etc. The upshot of this is that you could see an alliance between the far right, socialists, and religious groups, which is generally united against the Arab list, the communists, and other non-Jewish or anti-Zionist groupings.
If you went to most places in the Middle East and asked average people about their thoughts on religious freedom, I'm not sure that you would find wide support for governments that didn't base themselves on religion. Maybe, I'm not sure where you're talking about. But following the model which was used under the Ottoman empire, most countries allow people theoretical freedom of religion. As long as you payed your taxes, didn't go evangelising, and didn't roam the streets eating bacon and swigging beer, Jews and Christians thrived. Of course after 1948 most of the Jews ended up in Israel, and over the past 20 years many of the Christians have been leaving for Europe or South America, but then again, a lot of educated Muslims have been leaving too. Go to downtown Beirut (what's still standing), you'll see that a certain co-existence can work, with a pariament made up of Christian, Sunni, Shia, and Druse members.
Expecting the U.S. to ever have a relationship, as a nation, with Jordan or Saudi Arabia, as it does with Great Britain or Israel is silly. Where are all the biggest oil companies in Saudi Arabia getting their professional labour? Who owns these oil companies?
It always amazes me how willing Americans are willing to talk about things they don't know an awful lot about. Philosophical speculation? Me, I'm more interested in facts on the street. I'm going to the American University in Cairo next year. If I don't know much about something, I tend to keep quiet.
England is worse than the US? As in more expensive? The patient pays nothing. So it's not expensive for the patient. There is no "insurance" system, because in a free market in insurance of that kind, you will always get someone trying to play the system. This results in a market which can become fundementally inefficient, where someone in perfect health with good financial resources pays very little, and someone in bad health and with little cash is left to suffer. Rather than insurance, healthcare in funded in the UK directly from taxation. The US spends around 13% of it's GDP on health, whereas the UK only 7%. The UK has universal healthcare, and a load of government paperwork. The US has millions with no healthcare, and a load of insurance paperwork. And some of the best doctors in the world. But I wouldn't want to get sick there.
Highest standards of backwards capability?! What if you maintain a largeish app written in a scripting language like Perl or PHP or Python with a SQL backend? A "simple" OS upgrade required us to change the new default apache config for our URL rewiting scheme, rewrite all our code for PHP safe mode, work out how the distro had changed SQL handling between releases, and go through a rigourous testing process. OK, PHP is one of the most unstable platforms to develop for, but this kind of case isn't that unusual. And doing all this work is required not by the customer, who doesn't care what platform the app runs on as long as it runs, it's required by sloppy backward compatibility between OS releases. "But it's more secure! Think of the new features!" Great. If only we could charge the client for all those hours.
Microsoft is an eithical company, at least in the eyes of ethical fund managers. They don't pour shampoo into the eyes of little bunnies, export arms to dodgy dictatorships, fill landfill sites with toxic waste, target the poor and the vulnerable in their ad campaigns, etc. Sure this is relative, they could behave better. But you'd have to be a real geek to rank the destruction of Netscape with destruction of the ozone layer.
I know 4 authors. One is an illustrator, another a photographer, another a journalist, another an economist. None of them are full time professional authors. It breaks down like this - a book takes 1-2 years to produce, and earns maybe US$10,000 if you're lucky. Advances are rare, and pretty small change. A book might get you some spin-off consultancy work or media appearances, but otherwise, it's mainly a labour of love. And it's madly competitive to get anything published at all, every other journalist/academic has their eye on the same market and a manuscript in the drawer. Anyway, to discuss the economics of this as though authors didn't exist is pretty much exactly how the status quo in publishing views it. The big winners are currently publishers, and the rare superstar author. Add in some more tech middlemen, and the authors still get screwed. Hey, that's progress.
How do you think long term reporting will be funded in future? For example, infiltrating mafia gangs, exploring the intricacies of unfashionable African wars, following terror operations across continents. These aren't something the average citizen journalist can find time to do, let alone the funding.
I don't understand why news outlets get so upset when sites like google point people to their content. They should think of it as free advertising.
So the revenue google makes from news-related keyword ads should go to google? Just who is it that's adding value? Look at it this way: historically, newpapers made 50% of their income from ads, the rest from sales and subscriptions. Now google wants to take the ad revenue, and leave the newpapers to deal with the expensive and time-consuming activity of news gathering. Maybe newpapers should just fold or sell up, and stop creating this product called news, because the is no longer a market to support it. Instead all news should be produced by PR consultants, information ministries and the marketing arms of large corporations. Commentary will be produced by unpaid bloggers at weekends, who won't get sacked for screwing up anything unimportant like facts. The horrible thing is, looking at a lot of what passes for "news" these days, I'm not too sure this hasn't already happenend.
My guess is that both sides have the capacity to cause more civillian casualties than they already have. And both sides know and accept that they will cause collateral damage. As it stands, 51 Israelis, including 18 civilians are dead. 750 Lebanese have died, mostly civillians, though it's hard to get the exact figure there as it's such a mess. Right now I'd rather be an Israeli civillian than a Lebanese one.
I like your stance though. Yeah, blame the Italians!
hamas (in gaza)... attacked israel during periods of previous calm.
I'm not clear what you're talking about here. After the IDF beach bombings in Gaza on 9 June? Calm is killing a dozen odd civillians? Yeah, this is relative, calm as in there aren't tanks in the street and house to house fighting like the West Bank in 2002. But if there was this kind of "calm" in Sderot in Israel, this kind of civillian death toll, where most of Hamas' crude missiles were landing, there would be uproar in the US. And plentiful supplies of high tech weapons. As it is, few in the US are much bothered by a few dead Arabs.
Ref Hizbollah, yeah, they had no business getting involved, but Gaza was a different case and your post is selective with the historical events you chose to remember. Do you have an agenda here, or is your memory just not what it used to be?
hizbollah fired rockets at israel, by the hundreds True. After Israel started bombing Lebanon. It takes 2 to escalate, let's not brush one side's actions or responsibilities under the carpet.
israel is a democratic country, with many mosques and christian churches, with many arabs living happily, working, going to schools, elected and participating in the israeli parliament, and so forth. contrast this with the many arab countries that are extremely oppressive to foreigners, and don't allow any non-muslim worship. life is much better for the average muslim in israel than it is for the average muslim in any arab country.
Well, where to start? Israel's democracy is founded on the displacement of 700k ex-citizens of Palestine, about half the population at the time, and the destruction of about 500 towns and villages after the 1948 war. I've visited several, and interviewed survivors of that war, both those who fled to Lebanon, and those who fled their villages and eventually recieved Israeli citizenship, even though their home villages were destroyed. These "internally displaced" refugees in Israel are better off than those in Lebanon, no question. The Lebanese bar Palestinians from jobs like medicine or teaching.
But Israeli Palestinians can't get planning permission to build, either on the sites of their former villages, or in the dedicated "Arab reserves", like Nazareth in the Gallilee, so population density is higher and life is harder than for Israel's Jewish citizens. They get a smaller peice of the pie on the education buget than their numbers, 20% of the population, should recieve. There are other areas of discrimination which are more subltle, like the Law of Return, or certain workplace practices. Yes, some of them are happy to be Israeli citizens, but none are totally ignorant of the fact that Israel is the state of the Jews, not the state of it's citizens. Is that your definition of democracy? This is why when Hezbollah rockets missed a military facility near Nazareth, the local (non-jewish) civillians didn't have bomb shelters.
Using a graphics card can result in weird performance problems. The problem I have comes from lack of graphics card memory. Each window is mapped into GPU memory (all 32M of it in my case), so while performance is good for a small number of windows, over about 10 open windows and performance dives as window textures are sent over the AGP bus. Having simpler window decorations (what information is all this texturing meant to convey to me anyway?) would allow a whole bunch more windows to be accelerated at once.
Considering the size, age and complexity of the sendmail code base, there can't be too many people who know which line to patch. Sendmail is ugly and unmaintainable, and needs to be rewritten from the ground up. Just ask sendmail. (The design document reminds me strongly of postfix. And no more sendmail.mc, yay!)
What do the FBI have to hide? Their remit is domestic intelligence gathering and law enforcement.
(And the CIA's remit is dirty tricks overseas. The US has no overseas intelligence gathering or analysis capability. Intelligence analysis is the president's job. Turf wars R us, God help us all.)
Saudi Arabia? Because they're a monarchy chiefly supported by the US and Britain (a puppet dicatorship if you will - watch 'Lawrence of Arabia' that's the Sauds).
Actually, Lawrence allied the British at that time with the family of the Sherif of Mecca, the Hashemites. Members of that family later went on to rule Iraq (for a time), and Jordan, up until the present day. The Saud clan were an obscure group practicing a radical new form of Islam in Riadh. Saud had made an alliance with the preacher Ibn Wahab in the 18th century. The movement was marginal until their conquest of the whole of Arabia in the 1920s. Their British backer post WW1 was Jack Philby, whose son became one of Britain's most infamous Communist agents in the 50s.
So how does this tie in with the "war on terror"? Financially, terrorism is a lossmaker. Any terrrorist org with money sure aint making that money from day-to-day terror operations. In Columbia, the FARC get their cash from supplying white powder to gringos. In Ireland, back in the day when the IRA made things go bang, the money came from either private US donations back to the mother country, or protection rackets in West Belfast. Hamas are broke, but the boy scout ethos makes them handy at building clinics or bombs. Each of these organisations is restricted to one main area of operations, and is no direct threat to the US.
Anyhow, as far as I know, racketeering, bombmaking, and trading narcrotics are still illegal. Why do you need a whole new set of "terror" laws to catch people who are breaking the law anyway? Maybe if I had spent more time in Washington rather than Belfast and Gaza, I would understand the answers to these questions.
I live in the UK, don't have a TV, and I don't pay the TV licence. I do use a lot of the BBC's services, the news website is the best in the world (which isn't saying much), and I listen to Radio 4, which ranges from assinine to inspired.
When I'm outisde the UK I still use those services. Thank you UK taxpayers. Should I be paying for them as a Brit, should I be paying for them as a Brit who lives overseas, and should foreigners who use the same services? And where should the money go from subscribers to BBC's News24 channel? Foreign drama sales? Monty Python reruns? DVD sales? Big questions, and not ones I'm qualified to answer.
I'm a journalist, and I've looked into selling work to the BBC, their terms/rates of pay suck for freelancers. I used to have a flatmate who joined the BBC, nearly drove her nuts, the politics and internal fighting. The BBC takes in a lot of intelligent and educated people, who can't do journalism for shit - graduates tend to be too impatient to be able to do a lot of serious legwork, they spend their days in front of screens rather than seeking out face time with intereresting sources. But that's a problem with many media in general now, not just the beeb. World going to hell in handbasket, news at 10.
I've been bi-lingual since the age of 5, and my grammar sucks. I know my grammar is bad, because now I'm learning a 3rd language (Arabic) there are a whole bunch of grammar terms that I don't know. I think learning a language as a kid allows you to pick up grammar implicitly, that is, you don't need to be able to articulate what the grammatical rules of a language are. This is how you do sentences in this language, this is how that language does it. Kind of. But once you learn languages as an adult, you're expected to know grammatical rules explicitly. What does "subjunctive" mean again?
A bike is "better" than a car. I'm not just counting reliability here, speed in my city for 4 wheeled traffic average is about 12 miles/hour, on a bike you can easily sustain 15, take shortcuts, etc. And don't get me started on parking, insurance and congestion charges in this crazy city (London). The one thing cars are good for is carrying heavy stuff. And navigating brain-dead highway interchanges. And running over pedestrians. And safe drink driving. OK, maybe cars are good for something.
Slashdot Mirror
I would suggest either Somalia or Democratic Republic of Congo. Both are places where you can have your freedom, and where you can live tax free without government interference. I would suggest you bring a kalashnikov though.
But seriously, I've been living in Egypt for 2 years, although it's a corrupt dictatorship, as a foreigner it can work quite well. Bribes can get you almost anything if you do it right. And as a foreign passport holder, you are immune to arrest on most of the usual charges like running a blog or saying bad things about the King. If you can get work with Oracle or Microsoft, wages are comparable to the West. And living is cheap.
The infrastructure is crumbling though, and I'm sick of it. I could move into a gated compound, and hang out with expats and foreign-educated Egyptians, but that would bore me to death. If I wanted that, I'd move to Dubai. Which is a whole other bag of weird.
I live in a city of 20 million people, and it is a disaster. Constant gridlock over major bridges, massive pollution, no green space, mass traffic casualties, ambulances unable to reach the dead and the dying. I suspect that motor cars do no scale well to mega-cities, but there are other factors involved here, illiteracy, corruption, poverty, and mismanagement.
I am so looking forward to living in the town of the future. Cities are so 1999.
Somaila has antibiotics, jeeps, cellphones and rocket propelled grenades. That is progress. At least from a narrow technological perspective.
Iran has a multi-party democracy.
Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy.
Iranian universities turn out scientists and engineers.
Saudi universities tun out ideologues.
Saudis were directly responsible for 9/11.
Saudis execute adulterers without judicial review.
Iran doesn't.
Saudis export their extreme ideology across moderate Arab states.
Iran doesn't.
Just who are the Americans trying to punish?
Brains could be the reason why humans have such a hard time giving birth, and why human babies are born so helpless compared to other mammal young.
Think about sex. Peacocks with the biggest tails get more. The tails are big and heavy, but if you have the strength to carry it around, hens will want to have your babies. They've been down that evolutionary road for so many generations that their tails are huge.
I suspect there may be a similar trend at work with humans. Swap tails for brains.
But then I could be wrong.
Guns do not make a revolution. Pepole do.
America has a gun for every citizen. Somalia does too. One is a war zone. The other isn't.
I live in Egypt, and can buy either original or copied Adobe Software from most computer stores. The thing with this country is the police are too busy drinking tea and chasing opponents of the ruling party to bother about US companies interests. Though of course, seeing as how much US military aid the country gets, they could probably be "persuaded".
This isn't just a Microsoft issue. Part of the problem is hardware vendors shipping exotic hardware with sloppy software. I was setting up an HP server recently, and while the hardware RAID "just worked" with linux, you need to install HP's awful kernel module to be able to see the error status of the disks, fans, power supplies, and chasis temperature. No, they don't use plain old SMART and lm_sensors. The HP reporting program doesn't even work right in cron, the reports it generates have "press space to continue" in the reports. What's wrong with using a standard unix pager? Suspect it was a port from Windows. And to make it all worse, I remember some older versions of this which required you to run a certain kernel. So then you have a choice - know the status of your box, or run an old and vulnerable kernel. Yuck.
Hardware vendors, either document your fancy kit and allow it to work with generic and well established software, or provide decent software. No excuses.
If you went to most places in the Middle East and asked average people about their thoughts on religious freedom, I'm not sure that you would find wide support for governments that didn't base themselves on religion. Maybe, I'm not sure where you're talking about. But following the model which was used under the Ottoman empire, most countries allow people theoretical freedom of religion. As long as you payed your taxes, didn't go evangelising, and didn't roam the streets eating bacon and swigging beer, Jews and Christians thrived. Of course after 1948 most of the Jews ended up in Israel, and over the past 20 years many of the Christians have been leaving for Europe or South America, but then again, a lot of educated Muslims have been leaving too. Go to downtown Beirut (what's still standing), you'll see that a certain co-existence can work, with a pariament made up of Christian, Sunni, Shia, and Druse members.
Expecting the U.S. to ever have a relationship, as a nation, with Jordan or Saudi Arabia, as it does with Great Britain or Israel is silly. Where are all the biggest oil companies in Saudi Arabia getting their professional labour? Who owns these oil companies?
It always amazes me how willing Americans are willing to talk about things they don't know an awful lot about. Philosophical speculation? Me, I'm more interested in facts on the street. I'm going to the American University in Cairo next year. If I don't know much about something, I tend to keep quiet.
England is worse than the US? As in more expensive? The patient pays nothing. So it's not expensive for the patient. There is no "insurance" system, because in a free market in insurance of that kind, you will always get someone trying to play the system. This results in a market which can become fundementally inefficient, where someone in perfect health with good financial resources pays very little, and someone in bad health and with little cash is left to suffer. Rather than insurance, healthcare in funded in the UK directly from taxation. The US spends around 13% of it's GDP on health, whereas the UK only 7%. The UK has universal healthcare, and a load of government paperwork. The US has millions with no healthcare, and a load of insurance paperwork. And some of the best doctors in the world. But I wouldn't want to get sick there.
Highest standards of backwards capability?! What if you maintain a largeish app written in a scripting language like Perl or PHP or Python with a SQL backend? A "simple" OS upgrade required us to change the new default apache config for our URL rewiting scheme, rewrite all our code for PHP safe mode, work out how the distro had changed SQL handling between releases, and go through a rigourous testing process. OK, PHP is one of the most unstable platforms to develop for, but this kind of case isn't that unusual. And doing all this work is required not by the customer, who doesn't care what platform the app runs on as long as it runs, it's required by sloppy backward compatibility between OS releases. "But it's more secure! Think of the new features!" Great. If only we could charge the client for all those hours.
Microsoft is an eithical company, at least in the eyes of ethical fund managers. They don't pour shampoo into the eyes of little bunnies, export arms to dodgy dictatorships, fill landfill sites with toxic waste, target the poor and the vulnerable in their ad campaigns, etc. Sure this is relative, they could behave better. But you'd have to be a real geek to rank the destruction of Netscape with destruction of the ozone layer.
I know 4 authors. One is an illustrator, another a photographer, another a journalist, another an economist. None of them are full time professional authors. It breaks down like this - a book takes 1-2 years to produce, and earns maybe US$10,000 if you're lucky. Advances are rare, and pretty small change. A book might get you some spin-off consultancy work or media appearances, but otherwise, it's mainly a labour of love. And it's madly competitive to get anything published at all, every other journalist/academic has their eye on the same market and a manuscript in the drawer. Anyway, to discuss the economics of this as though authors didn't exist is pretty much exactly how the status quo in publishing views it. The big winners are currently publishers, and the rare superstar author. Add in some more tech middlemen, and the authors still get screwed. Hey, that's progress.
How do you think long term reporting will be funded in future? For example, infiltrating mafia gangs, exploring the intricacies of unfashionable African wars, following terror operations across continents. These aren't something the average citizen journalist can find time to do, let alone the funding.
So the revenue google makes from news-related keyword ads should go to google? Just who is it that's adding value? Look at it this way: historically, newpapers made 50% of their income from ads, the rest from sales and subscriptions. Now google wants to take the ad revenue, and leave the newpapers to deal with the expensive and time-consuming activity of news gathering. Maybe newpapers should just fold or sell up, and stop creating this product called news, because the is no longer a market to support it. Instead all news should be produced by PR consultants, information ministries and the marketing arms of large corporations. Commentary will be produced by unpaid bloggers at weekends, who won't get sacked for screwing up anything unimportant like facts. The horrible thing is, looking at a lot of what passes for "news" these days, I'm not too sure this hasn't already happenend.
My guess is that both sides have the capacity to cause more civillian casualties than they already have. And both sides know and accept that they will cause collateral damage. As it stands, 51 Israelis, including 18 civilians are dead. 750 Lebanese have died, mostly civillians, though it's hard to get the exact figure there as it's such a mess. Right now I'd rather be an Israeli civillian than a Lebanese one.
I like your stance though. Yeah, blame the Italians!
I'm not clear what you're talking about here. After the IDF beach bombings in Gaza on 9 June? Calm is killing a dozen odd civillians? Yeah, this is relative, calm as in there aren't tanks in the street and house to house fighting like the West Bank in 2002. But if there was this kind of "calm" in Sderot in Israel, this kind of civillian death toll, where most of Hamas' crude missiles were landing, there would be uproar in the US. And plentiful supplies of high tech weapons. As it is, few in the US are much bothered by a few dead Arabs.
Ref Hizbollah, yeah, they had no business getting involved, but Gaza was a different case and your post is selective with the historical events you chose to remember. Do you have an agenda here, or is your memory just not what it used to be?
hizbollah fired rockets at israel, by the hundreds
True. After Israel started bombing Lebanon. It takes 2 to escalate, let's not brush one side's actions or responsibilities under the carpet.
israel is a democratic country, with many mosques and christian churches, with many arabs living happily, working, going to schools, elected and participating in the israeli parliament, and so forth. contrast this with the many arab countries that are extremely oppressive to foreigners, and don't allow any non-muslim worship. life is much better for the average muslim in israel than it is for the average muslim in any arab country.
Well, where to start? Israel's democracy is founded on the displacement of 700k ex-citizens of Palestine, about half the population at the time, and the destruction of about 500 towns and villages after the 1948 war. I've visited several, and interviewed survivors of that war, both those who fled to Lebanon, and those who fled their villages and eventually recieved Israeli citizenship, even though their home villages were destroyed. These "internally displaced" refugees in Israel are better off than those in Lebanon, no question. The Lebanese bar Palestinians from jobs like medicine or teaching.
But Israeli Palestinians can't get planning permission to build, either on the sites of their former villages, or in the dedicated "Arab reserves", like Nazareth in the Gallilee, so population density is higher and life is harder than for Israel's Jewish citizens. They get a smaller peice of the pie on the education buget than their numbers, 20% of the population, should recieve. There are other areas of discrimination which are more subltle, like the Law of Return, or certain workplace practices. Yes, some of them are happy to be Israeli citizens, but none are totally ignorant of the fact that Israel is the state of the Jews, not the state of it's citizens. Is that your definition of democracy? This is why when Hezbollah rockets missed a military facility near Nazareth, the local (non-jewish) civillians didn't have bomb shelters.
Using a graphics card can result in weird performance problems. The problem I have comes from lack of graphics card memory. Each window is mapped into GPU memory (all 32M of it in my case), so while performance is good for a small number of windows, over about 10 open windows and performance dives as window textures are sent over the AGP bus. Having simpler window decorations (what information is all this texturing meant to convey to me anyway?) would allow a whole bunch more windows to be accelerated at once.
Considering the size, age and complexity of the sendmail code base, there can't be too many people who know which line to patch. Sendmail is ugly and unmaintainable, and needs to be rewritten from the ground up. Just ask sendmail. (The design document reminds me strongly of postfix. And no more sendmail.mc, yay!)
(And the CIA's remit is dirty tricks overseas. The US has no overseas intelligence gathering or analysis capability. Intelligence analysis is the president's job. Turf wars R us, God help us all.)
Actually, Lawrence allied the British at that time with the family of the Sherif of Mecca, the Hashemites. Members of that family later went on to rule Iraq (for a time), and Jordan, up until the present day. The Saud clan were an obscure group practicing a radical new form of Islam in Riadh. Saud had made an alliance with the preacher Ibn Wahab in the 18th century. The movement was marginal until their conquest of the whole of Arabia in the 1920s. Their British backer post WW1 was Jack Philby, whose son became one of Britain's most infamous Communist agents in the 50s.
So how does this tie in with the "war on terror"? Financially, terrorism is a lossmaker. Any terrrorist org with money sure aint making that money from day-to-day terror operations. In Columbia, the FARC get their cash from supplying white powder to gringos. In Ireland, back in the day when the IRA made things go bang, the money came from either private US donations back to the mother country, or protection rackets in West Belfast. Hamas are broke, but the boy scout ethos makes them handy at building clinics or bombs. Each of these organisations is restricted to one main area of operations, and is no direct threat to the US.
Anyhow, as far as I know, racketeering, bombmaking, and trading narcrotics are still illegal. Why do you need a whole new set of "terror" laws to catch people who are breaking the law anyway? Maybe if I had spent more time in Washington rather than Belfast and Gaza, I would understand the answers to these questions.
I live in the UK, don't have a TV, and I don't pay the TV licence. I do use a lot of the BBC's services, the news website is the best in the world (which isn't saying much), and I listen to Radio 4, which ranges from assinine to inspired.
When I'm outisde the UK I still use those services. Thank you UK taxpayers. Should I be paying for them as a Brit, should I be paying for them as a Brit who lives overseas, and should foreigners who use the same services? And where should the money go from subscribers to BBC's News24 channel? Foreign drama sales? Monty Python reruns? DVD sales? Big questions, and not ones I'm qualified to answer.
I'm a journalist, and I've looked into selling work to the BBC, their terms/rates of pay suck for freelancers. I used to have a flatmate who joined the BBC, nearly drove her nuts, the politics and internal fighting. The BBC takes in a lot of intelligent and educated people, who can't do journalism for shit - graduates tend to be too impatient to be able to do a lot of serious legwork, they spend their days in front of screens rather than seeking out face time with intereresting sources. But that's a problem with many media in general now, not just the beeb. World going to hell in handbasket, news at 10.
I've been bi-lingual since the age of 5, and my grammar sucks. I know my grammar is bad, because now I'm learning a 3rd language (Arabic) there are a whole bunch of grammar terms that I don't know. I think learning a language as a kid allows you to pick up grammar implicitly, that is, you don't need to be able to articulate what the grammatical rules of a language are. This is how you do sentences in this language, this is how that language does it. Kind of. But once you learn languages as an adult, you're expected to know grammatical rules explicitly. What does "subjunctive" mean again?
A bike is "better" than a car. I'm not just counting reliability here, speed in my city for 4 wheeled traffic average is about 12 miles/hour, on a bike you can easily sustain 15, take shortcuts, etc. And don't get me started on parking, insurance and congestion charges in this crazy city (London). The one thing cars are good for is carrying heavy stuff. And navigating brain-dead highway interchanges. And running over pedestrians. And safe drink driving. OK, maybe cars are good for something.