Native Americans smoked the heck out of it for centuries, and you never really hear about them dying in droves from lung or other cancer caused by smoking tobacco.
Given the low average life expectancy of people living that close to nature, or in pre-industrial society in general, I doubt any negative effects of tobacco would have had any statistically-significant impact. Same with genetic tendency of people from sub-Saharan Africa towards higher rates of heart disease -- the vast majority of people didn't live long enough for that to matter. Likewise with lactose tolerance -- when food is chronically scarce, the extra calories from being able to consume dairy products are much more important than the drawbacks of the accompanying increase in saturated fat consumption. It's only in the last couple centuries or so that things like heart disease, stroke, and cancer have climbed up the causes-of-death list, because people have (mostly) stopped dying of starvation, malnutrition, and water/airborne diseases.
If someone can scam a theory that space travel for a week or two extends your life by a year or 2, watch the lemmings line up like there's no tomorrow.
Even if it did, though, I'm curious how much the stress of getting into orbit would be, for folks who haven't fully trained for it. I presume there would be some sort of recommended work-out regimen beforehand, but astronauts and fighter pilots do a whole lot of that to withstand g-forces.
The pilots of those actual Falcons never called their fighters by the AF-approved name. They called it the Viper.
Named after the original Battlestar Galactica fighters, by the way.
Crew-assigned nicknames are almost always better and/or more-colorful than the official ones. For instance:
B-1: Lancer vs. Lawn Dart
B-52: Stratofortress vs. Big Ugly Fat Fucker (BUFF)
C-5: Galaxy vs. Fat Albert or Linda Lovelace (I presume that last comes from the fact that the C-5 can tilt the nose section upward to, err, "swallow" large items of cargo.
F-105: Thunderchief vs. Thud or Lead Sled.
F-111: No name at all! vs. Ardvaark or Switchblade.
An example app has voice transcription? Simultaneous multi-device editing, cross-platform?
As I said, I was comparing between the web versions, not having checked out the Android version yet. Now that I have, my opinion remains the same. To take the items you mention, one by one:
Voice transcription: that's part of the Speech to Text API of the OS. Based on a quick search of example apps, you're talking less than ten source-code statements to do the transcription. Major kudos to the API writers for making it that easy to use, but the coding required of the Keep team is very much demo-app level difficulty.
Simultaneous multi-device editing: that's part of the Google Drive API. The example Android app in the Google Drive documentation does everything that Keep does except for the checklist (which is just a custom display widget) and voice transcription (which could be added to it in a few minutes, as mentioned above). The rest is just a little UI polish.
Cross-platform: there's an Android example app for Google Drive. There's a web-based example app (more than one, actually). There's a Java one and a.NET one.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Keep is bad. It's an excellent demonstration of the power and developer-friendliness of Google's APIs, but a competitor to Evernote or Springpad, it's not. Even leaving aside that comparison, I've seen more-ambitious apps in various "How to Program Android" type of books. And I expect a bit more from Google. They made this with their own foundation and building blocks. They should get more-impressive results than this when playing on their own turf.
I've used both Evernote and Springpad, and stuck with the latter, but after fiddling around with the web interface on Google Keep for a while, my question is: this is supposed to be a rival service? It looks more like something from the example page of a web app library. All you seem to able to do is enter text notes, and lists. Perhaps Keep for Android has more functionality, but just comparing between the web versions of all three, Keep doesn't have 1/10th of the capability of either of the others. It's like comparing Word with Notepad.
Why do you say westernized? Is it wrong to say Iran was a modernized country? It was not westernized - Iran still had it owns culture, traditions, way of doing things etc.
Oh, they were quite westernized. In some ways, horribly so. This was during the disco era, and they loved it. I can still hear "Disco Duck" in my head, after 35 years. Please, please, make it stop.
Just because the women were free to wear hijab, means it was westernized? Just because women could dress like they wanted, it means westernized? Does west have a patent on this or something?
When you speak of culture rather than technology, "modernizing" means more or less the same thing as "adopting Western societal norms regarding individual freedom of behavior." That's not to say that Western countries are perfect, or that non-Western countries have no good points, but "letting women dress like they wanted" is just a subset of "letting people do what they want", which was developed primarily in the West.
Again, that's not to say that no one was (or is) ever oppressed in the West, or that no one was (or is) free at all elsewhere, but you're kidding yourself if you don't admit that tolerance for non-conforming behavior didn't develop much more strongly in the West before it caught on in other places.
You already have the answer to your question. The well-schooled ones with liberal tendencies worked with you because they *left* Iran. And there is a reason they left. If it wasn't the Shah, it was the mullahs. I went to school with a number of Iranian kids whose parents used their brains and jumped ship as soon as it was clear who was steering it.
Iran has had a huge brain drain problem, starting in 1979. A lot of smart people left, and also a lot of them were in the West getting their degrees, and never went back. As someone who is part Iranian, this saddens me. Had the Revolution stopped with just deposing the Shah, and the government been fully in the hands of Bazargan or Banisadr, Iran would probably be the most democratic country in the region now, and have a tech industry along the lines of India's, though not as large owing to the smaller population.
As I've told others, if you want to see where Iran was heading, culturally, prior to Khomeini taking over, visit Tehrangeles in Southern California.
As far as extremist or "dumb", rural support has always been important to these religious leaders in Iran, and those folks have always been a lot more religiously conservative and less well educated. This doesn't make them dumb, but it does make them ignorant, and of course, the very definition of the word "provincial".
Part of the problem is that they're less-literate, so they have to trust the akhonds (lower-level clergy) on religious questions instead of being able to read the Koran for themselves. Therefore, when dealing with anything that might be subject to interpretation, all they have to go by is their local akhond's interpretation. Further, quite a few of the akhonds are themselves functionally illiterate, and are only passing on what their teacher told them the Koran says.
Khomeini in-charge was a result of two things: he was a symbol of resistance which made him a household name and then, the hubris of the educated liberal groups in Iran in thinking they could control him.
They thought they were getting a Dalai Lama sort of person, albeit a much more conservative sort, and instead, they got.... well what the Dalai Lama used to be, the ruler of a theocracy. Surprise!
Basically, what happened is the same thing that has happened with many revolutions in the last hundred years or so: a coalition gets together to overthrow a dictator, and once this is accomplished, the most-motivated, most-trained, best-organized subgroup of the coalition takes over, turns out to be worse than the dictator who was just overthrown, and starts executing or at least suppressing its former coalition partners. In Iran, this subgroup was Khomeini and the Islamists. In Russia, this was Lenin and the Bolsheviks. (And wouldn't either of those be great names for a band?) Right now, the Muslim Brotherhood is becoming (or already is) this in Egypt.
Funny, I was under the impression that a large majority of Slashdot participants were in favor of unfettered communications and against censorship, especially when it comes to the Internet. There is a story category named "Your Rights Online." Should it be renamed to "Your Rights Online Unless You Live In A Country The US Considers Bad, In Which Case We'll Pretend Everything Is OK"?
Censorship should be criticized, whoever does it and wherever it is done, period.
I stopped buying Card new after he did his homosexuality should be illegal but the laws should be selectively enforced ranting, ahem, rather some time ago. I was also shocked - I'd attended one of his secular humanist revivals not that many years before, and this was really not the impression I'd gotten of him. I stopped buying him used because I found his writing to be increasingly tedious. There was a period in which it was interesting, in a horrific, tortured sort of way, to read his writing, especially regarding sexuality and religion. Gnnggh!
I confess that I haven't read any of Card's stuff besides the first five books of the Ender series. All of the retcon in Ender's Shadow made me stop at that point. So maybe the "gnnggh" of which you speak is present elsewhere, but I didn't notice it.
Tell me, if we were dealing instead with a hypothetical author, and one who had written extensively on white superiority... wouldn't the thought of him writing for Superman kind of creep you out?
If he had Superman suddenly start spouting white superiority, absolutely. Otherwise, no. I'm not saying that I would never forgo a book that expressed ideas that I found repugnant. But they would have to be ideas expressed in the book, not by the author outside the context of the book. Now, if Card's story involved Superman kicking Green Lantern out of the Justice League for being gay, I could certainly understand the fuss.
Horses haven't mattered since before Poland used them against the invading Nazis.
Just a note: the whole "Polish cavalry against tanks" thing is a myth. They did use cavalry (with decent success actually) against German infantry, and they sometimes use horses to transport anti-tank guns, but there were no instances of Winged Hussars charging Panzers.
It's a guy on a horse with a gun -- target practice for a Humvee.
US special forces used horses quite effectively in Afghanistan in 2001. Mostly they were used to get around quickly to designate targets for airstrikes, but they were also ridden into combat.
Don't the South Koreans have some of those newfangled anti-artillery radars? How many volleys could they manage to push through their barrels before their positions get obliterated by counterfire?
Perhaps, but even one volley would mean an awful lot of death and destruction in Seoul, which has one of the highest population densities of any city in the world. Also, even if the artillery positions are immediately determined (or perhaps already known, as another responder suggested), they can only be taken out quickly if South Korea has guns in place and on alert to perform counterbattery fire, or has aircraft loitering above. Otherwise they have to take the time to bring their own artillery into position and/or arm and launch airstrikes. The NK fire could easily drive deaths above the 10,000 level in that time. Taking out the NK guns/launchers ahead of time would be the best course (if it can be done quickly and all at once, because any that are missed will be firing at Seoul), but unless overt hostilities have already broken out, that won't be a politically-viable option.
I agree that no one's rights are being violated here -- this is just the free market at work. It does, however, speak poorly of boycotters' ability to deal with the fact that there are people in the world who disagree with them. It is, essentially, a secularized version of the religious impulse to stamp out heresy.
Do you (general you, not parent post author) really want to reduce your consumption of books, movies, etc. to only those from people you agree with? How many techies are fans of the works of Tolkien, who was famously anti-technology? I love the Elric saga, even though Michael Moorcock is a Marxist, an ideology I find utterly vile. I totally disagree with Hayao Miyazaki's pacifism and anti-nuclear views, yet I can enjoy his anime just fine. Etc. Etc.
May 1 is 'International Day of the Worker', and is celebrated in many countries around the world. It was originally a Soviet holiday, so of course most Americans have never heard of it.
Actually, it pre-dates the USSR by almost two decades. It was established by the Socialist Second International in 1889, to commemorate what was called the Haymarket Affair in Chicago a few years before. Most folks I know are quite aware what May Day is, though of course that's not a random sample, and I expect most of them assume (as did you) that it is Soviet in origin. You need a little less of the attitude embodied in your sig.
In 1994, San Francisco decided to close public schools on Lunar New Year, but this was largely a response to demographic reality rather than political pressure.
Which is as it should be, and an indicator that federalism is working just fine, thank you very much. In an area where lots of people want to take the same day off, it's off. Otherwise, it's not. Heck, we could make Nooruz (Persian New Year) a national holiday, but I doubt there's a demand for that anywhere except in certain parts of Los Angeles. It would be nice for the various Slavic and Greek enclaves around the US if their New Year (based on the Julian rather than Gregorian calendar) was a national holiday. We could make Rosh Hashanah a national holiday, along with at least half a dozen different New Year days from India (it depends on the region). Etc. Etc. Etc.
It's one thing to be respectful of minority groups, and for everyone to have the same legal rights regardless of ethnicity, religion, etc. That's as it should be. But it's an entirely-different thing to bend over backwards pretending that there are no minorities. I wouldn't expect to get Christmas off if I lived in China, nor would it be any kind of insult or malign discrimination on China's part if I didn't.
Kit: The letter K appears in this script 1,456 times. That's perfectly divisible by 3.
Freddy: So what? So what you saying?
Kit: What am I saying? KKK appears in this script 486 times!
No, the death of Ned Agha-Soltan is widely disputed.
Disputed? Yes. Widely? No. It's disputed by the mullahs and their supporters. Who, incidentally, have banned prayers for her, and are probably responsible for repeatedly descrating her grave.
I should also mention that dehumanization of Muslims is a nasty policy and that has nothing to do with criticism. It's used a part of harassment policy that Muslims face in the west and also a tool for covering up everyday killings of Muslim civilians in Pakistan, Afghanistan and many other countries. When they are call animals (monkeys, etc) who cares about many of them who are killed by US attacks everyday by various weapons ranging from rifles to missiles and drones.
Funny, none of my relatives in the US (some Muslims, and some who aren't but would likely be assumed to be Muslims due to their ethnicity) have ever, to my knowledge, been harassed at all. If anything, when the subject has come up, they're rather less worried about it than most people. And the "Ahmadinejad is a monkey" meme originated in Iran.
What I liked especially is that it inverts the usual dynamic of most "some person(s) use something to cause a disaster" stories. For most of them, the initial part of the story involves the antagonists trying to acquire or learn how to create the mechanism to cause the disaster -- a bomb, a plague, nerve gas, friggin' laser beams, whatever -- and the protagonist is trying to stop them from getting/creating the mechanism, and failing that, from using it. Here, we start with someone who already has the necessarily knowledge, who then turns into an antagonist via an external influence.
Another good novel (written when genetic engineering was fairly new) is The White Plague, written by Frank Herbert of Dune fame. Basic premise (not really spoilers, since as I recall this is on the book's back cover): an expert molecular biologist, otherwise sane and benevolent, cracks when his wife and daughter are killed in a terrorist attack. He creates a highly contagious virus that is lethal to women but harmless to men, and lets it loose in the countries he considers responsible, so that the men there will share his loss. Then he threatens to do so elsewhere if the rest of the world doesn't send all immigrants from those countries back home and let the plague run its course.
Don't know how plausible it is scientifically, but it's a good read, like all of Herbert's stuff. Well, like all of his stuff before God Emperor of Dune...
Mr Emami is an Iranian. Whom speake like that about president of his mother's country, is not a reach human. Who could beleive to this kind of humans.
It's my dad's country, actually, though I did live there for a while -- specifically, I was there when Khomeini took over, so I got to see the before and after versions, and whatever the Shah's faults, what replaced him is much, much worse.
As to humanity, ask Neda Agha-Soltan... oh, wait, you can't, she was shot by a basiji during the 2009 demonstrations. Perhaps you can ask Farrokhroo Parsa, then... no, she was executed by the mullahs for the crime of being appointed Minister of Education by the Shah. Not the head of SAVAK or the army or the police, not responsible for the death or injury of anyone, just the Minister of Education, the first woman cabinet minister ever in Iran. How about asking Mona Mahmudnizhad... oops, can't do that, she was executed along with nine other Iranian women by the mullahs in 1983 for the crime of being a Baha'i.
And as for criticizing a country's president, well, that's an everyday occurence in a free country. No matter how much I supported or respected a US president, I would never call someone "not human" for criticizing him. Heck, back in High School, I had a teacher who mocked the president every chance he got, but all I did was laugh at him (outside of class, of course). And come to think of it, he never got arrested or fired. How very strange, huh?
One major difference: other religions don't sue you for quoting their writings. When was the last time someone got sued for publishing passages of the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Koran, the Upanishads, or the Buddhavacana? What other religions claim to have legally-enforceable trade secrets?
Mind you, I'm a little bit biased here. For several years I worked at a business whose management was made up almost entirely of Scientologists. There's nothing wrong with that per se -- if you start a small business, you're likely to give jobs to people you know, and if you're religious, then it's likely a lot of people you know go to your church. However, they ran things using what's called "Hubbard Management Technology", which is really just a thinly-veiled rebranding of Scientology itself. Again, there's nothing wrong with using one's religion as an ethical guide at work -- "thou shalt not steal -> don't bill clients for more hours than it took", for example. But this stuff was all-pervasive, including advocating "sue your critics to shut them up", how proper training should be conducted, assigning employees positions on the Scientology "conditions" scale and making them do "rehabilitation projects" if they weren't high enough (luckily they never tried that on non-Scientologist employees), decisions on how to do safety classes (always done by a chiropractor due to Scientologist opinions on regular doctors), etc. There was also a lot of silly cargo-cult stuff, basically "Hubbard did this when running his church, so we have to do it that way now." Hubbard reviewed stats on Thursday? We have to do stats on Thursday. Hubbard used certain color marks on different types of memos? We have to use those colors on our memos. It's basically akin to a Christian coming up with a "Jesus Management Technology", with rules like "your company has to have twelve departments, because Jesus had twelve apostles. Also, the water in the drinking fountains must be either hot or cold, but not lukewarm."
One non-sinister incident, which we programmers (non-Scientologists all) found hilarious at the time: We were working towards releasing a new version, and keeping track of the daily open bug count as we fixed things. To give us an idea of our progress, we had a line graph on a whiteboard. Company president comes in, looks at the graph, and frowns. Apparently, there's a Scientology rule somewhere that when you make a graph, "good" must be "up." (They set enormous store by "stats"). Obviously, bugs are bad, so having more bugs be higher on the graph than fewer bugs is wrong verging on blasphemy. He then proceeds to carefully redraw our graph with the Y-axis inverted, 0 at the top, and the previous peak bug count at the bottom of the whiteboard, so that as bugs were fixed we'd be "up-stat", and the graph would go "up" towards a bug-free release. Objections from us were met with a firm "no, no, you have to draw it like that" -- but in a nice, gentle way, as if we programmers just didn't have the deep understanding of such things that trained Scientologists do. We went along with it, along with much chuckling among ourselves, until the testers started in on a major feature they hadn't gone over yet -- and the bug count went higher than the previous maximum, so that drawing the graph would now involve drawing lines on the air below the whiteboard.
Actually, Ahmadinejad usually is depicted as a monkey in the expatriate Iranian press, and (so I hear from relatives there) commonly referred to as such in Iran by a lot of folks. There was even an incident a few years ago where a girl on a kid's TV show innocently mentioned that her dad had nicknamed her toy monkey after the guy. Part of it is due to perceived physical resemblance, and part due to the belief that he doesn't actually wield independent power but is just Supreme Leader Khamenei's "trained pet."
That's a bit deceptive. Microsoft contributed code needed for its VMs to host Linux, nothing more.
If they contributed, they contributed. Does it matter that they did so because there is a demand for their VMs to run Linux, rather than out of the goodness of their hearts? One of the benefits of having something be open source is that numerous different parties can fix bugs or add functionality that may (per consensus) improve the project, but which only one party has the time, knowledge, and motivation for. For folks other than the project's core developers, that motivation will often be "I need it to do X" not "I want to help everyone who uses this and promote open source software."
It doesn't help that even the wider international community applies the double standard of congratulating most countries on their space programmes while condemning NK. Why would India be allowed such a programme when NK isn't? Why should the US for that matter?
Because both India and the US are democracies, and North Korea is not. Same goes for France and the UK. I would have zero problem with, say, South Korea or Poland or Australia having nukes, or if South Africa decided they wanted them again. Unfortunately there's nothing that can be done about the PRC having them, but ideally, only democracies should have nuclear weapons.
In fact, it's misleading to speak of NK or other dictatorships as countries in the same sense as democracies, in this question and in others, because that implies we're talking about what the people of those countries want and what they have a right to do. The question is not "why should India have nukes but not NK?" The question is "Why should President Mukherjee of India have control of a nuclear arsenal, but not Kim Jong-un of North Korea?" Well, because President Mukherjee was voted his authority by 700+ million Indians (~70%), while Kim Jong-un inherited his authority and continues to wield it because, for the high-ranking officials who count, showing anything less than absolute support means trading your perks for a firing squad. I don't put the decisions of free Indian citizens on the same moral plane as those of North Korean generals.
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Native Americans smoked the heck out of it for centuries, and you never really hear about them dying in droves from lung or other cancer caused by smoking tobacco.
Given the low average life expectancy of people living that close to nature, or in pre-industrial society in general, I doubt any negative effects of tobacco would have had any statistically-significant impact. Same with genetic tendency of people from sub-Saharan Africa towards higher rates of heart disease -- the vast majority of people didn't live long enough for that to matter. Likewise with lactose tolerance -- when food is chronically scarce, the extra calories from being able to consume dairy products are much more important than the drawbacks of the accompanying increase in saturated fat consumption. It's only in the last couple centuries or so that things like heart disease, stroke, and cancer have climbed up the causes-of-death list, because people have (mostly) stopped dying of starvation, malnutrition, and water/airborne diseases.
If someone can scam a theory that space travel for a week or two extends your life by a year or 2, watch the lemmings line up like there's no tomorrow.
Even if it did, though, I'm curious how much the stress of getting into orbit would be, for folks who haven't fully trained for it. I presume there would be some sort of recommended work-out regimen beforehand, but astronauts and fighter pilots do a whole lot of that to withstand g-forces.
The pilots of those actual Falcons never called their fighters by the AF-approved name. They called it the Viper.
Named after the original Battlestar Galactica fighters, by the way.
Crew-assigned nicknames are almost always better and/or more-colorful than the official ones. For instance:
B-1: Lancer vs. Lawn Dart
B-52: Stratofortress vs. Big Ugly Fat Fucker (BUFF)
C-5: Galaxy vs. Fat Albert or Linda Lovelace (I presume that last comes from the fact that the C-5 can tilt the nose section upward to, err, "swallow" large items of cargo.
F-105: Thunderchief vs. Thud or Lead Sled.
F-111: No name at all! vs. Ardvaark or Switchblade.
An example app has voice transcription? Simultaneous multi-device editing, cross-platform?
As I said, I was comparing between the web versions, not having checked out the Android version yet. Now that I have, my opinion remains the same. To take the items you mention, one by one:
Voice transcription: that's part of the Speech to Text API of the OS. Based on a quick search of example apps, you're talking less than ten source-code statements to do the transcription. Major kudos to the API writers for making it that easy to use, but the coding required of the Keep team is very much demo-app level difficulty.
Simultaneous multi-device editing: that's part of the Google Drive API. The example Android app in the Google Drive documentation does everything that Keep does except for the checklist (which is just a custom display widget) and voice transcription (which could be added to it in a few minutes, as mentioned above). The rest is just a little UI polish.
Cross-platform: there's an Android example app for Google Drive. There's a web-based example app (more than one, actually). There's a Java one and a .NET one.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Keep is bad. It's an excellent demonstration of the power and developer-friendliness of Google's APIs, but a competitor to Evernote or Springpad, it's not. Even leaving aside that comparison, I've seen more-ambitious apps in various "How to Program Android" type of books. And I expect a bit more from Google. They made this with their own foundation and building blocks. They should get more-impressive results than this when playing on their own turf.
I've used both Evernote and Springpad, and stuck with the latter, but after fiddling around with the web interface on Google Keep for a while, my question is: this is supposed to be a rival service? It looks more like something from the example page of a web app library. All you seem to able to do is enter text notes, and lists. Perhaps Keep for Android has more functionality, but just comparing between the web versions of all three, Keep doesn't have 1/10th of the capability of either of the others. It's like comparing Word with Notepad.
Why do you say westernized? Is it wrong to say Iran was a modernized country? It was not westernized - Iran still had it owns culture, traditions, way of doing things etc.
Oh, they were quite westernized. In some ways, horribly so. This was during the disco era, and they loved it. I can still hear "Disco Duck" in my head, after 35 years. Please, please, make it stop.
Just because the women were free to wear hijab, means it was westernized? Just because women could dress like they wanted, it means westernized? Does west have a patent on this or something?
When you speak of culture rather than technology, "modernizing" means more or less the same thing as "adopting Western societal norms regarding individual freedom of behavior." That's not to say that Western countries are perfect, or that non-Western countries have no good points, but "letting women dress like they wanted" is just a subset of "letting people do what they want", which was developed primarily in the West.
Again, that's not to say that no one was (or is) ever oppressed in the West, or that no one was (or is) free at all elsewhere, but you're kidding yourself if you don't admit that tolerance for non-conforming behavior didn't develop much more strongly in the West before it caught on in other places.
You already have the answer to your question. The well-schooled ones with liberal tendencies worked with you because they *left* Iran. And there is a reason they left. If it wasn't the Shah, it was the mullahs. I went to school with a number of Iranian kids whose parents used their brains and jumped ship as soon as it was clear who was steering it.
Iran has had a huge brain drain problem, starting in 1979. A lot of smart people left, and also a lot of them were in the West getting their degrees, and never went back. As someone who is part Iranian, this saddens me. Had the Revolution stopped with just deposing the Shah, and the government been fully in the hands of Bazargan or Banisadr, Iran would probably be the most democratic country in the region now, and have a tech industry along the lines of India's, though not as large owing to the smaller population.
As I've told others, if you want to see where Iran was heading, culturally, prior to Khomeini taking over, visit Tehrangeles in Southern California.
As far as extremist or "dumb", rural support has always been important to these religious leaders in Iran, and those folks have always been a lot more religiously conservative and less well educated. This doesn't make them dumb, but it does make them ignorant, and of course, the very definition of the word "provincial".
Part of the problem is that they're less-literate, so they have to trust the akhonds (lower-level clergy) on religious questions instead of being able to read the Koran for themselves. Therefore, when dealing with anything that might be subject to interpretation, all they have to go by is their local akhond's interpretation. Further, quite a few of the akhonds are themselves functionally illiterate, and are only passing on what their teacher told them the Koran says.
Khomeini in-charge was a result of two things: he was a symbol of resistance which made him a household name and then, the hubris of the educated liberal groups in Iran in thinking they could control him.
They thought they were getting a Dalai Lama sort of person, albeit a much more conservative sort, and instead, they got.... well what the Dalai Lama used to be, the ruler of a theocracy. Surprise!
Basically, what happened is the same thing that has happened with many revolutions in the last hundred years or so: a coalition gets together to overthrow a dictator, and once this is accomplished, the most-motivated, most-trained, best-organized subgroup of the coalition takes over, turns out to be worse than the dictator who was just overthrown, and starts executing or at least suppressing its former coalition partners. In Iran, this subgroup was Khomeini and the Islamists. In Russia, this was Lenin and the Bolsheviks. (And wouldn't either of those be great names for a band?) Right now, the Muslim Brotherhood is becoming (or already is) this in Egypt.
Funny, I was under the impression that a large majority of Slashdot participants were in favor of unfettered communications and against censorship, especially when it comes to the Internet. There is a story category named "Your Rights Online." Should it be renamed to "Your Rights Online Unless You Live In A Country The US Considers Bad, In Which Case We'll Pretend Everything Is OK"?
Censorship should be criticized, whoever does it and wherever it is done, period.
I stopped buying Card new after he did his homosexuality should be illegal but the laws should be selectively enforced ranting, ahem, rather some time ago. I was also shocked - I'd attended one of his secular humanist revivals not that many years before, and this was really not the impression I'd gotten of him. I stopped buying him used because I found his writing to be increasingly tedious. There was a period in which it was interesting, in a horrific, tortured sort of way, to read his writing, especially regarding sexuality and religion. Gnnggh!
I confess that I haven't read any of Card's stuff besides the first five books of the Ender series. All of the retcon in Ender's Shadow made me stop at that point. So maybe the "gnnggh" of which you speak is present elsewhere, but I didn't notice it.
Tell me, if we were dealing instead with a hypothetical author, and one who had written extensively on white superiority... wouldn't the thought of him writing for Superman kind of creep you out?
If he had Superman suddenly start spouting white superiority, absolutely. Otherwise, no. I'm not saying that I would never forgo a book that expressed ideas that I found repugnant. But they would have to be ideas expressed in the book, not by the author outside the context of the book. Now, if Card's story involved Superman kicking Green Lantern out of the Justice League for being gay, I could certainly understand the fuss.
Horses haven't mattered since before Poland used them against the invading Nazis.
Just a note: the whole "Polish cavalry against tanks" thing is a myth. They did use cavalry (with decent success actually) against German infantry, and they sometimes use horses to transport anti-tank guns, but there were no instances of Winged Hussars charging Panzers.
It's a guy on a horse with a gun -- target practice for a Humvee.
US special forces used horses quite effectively in Afghanistan in 2001. Mostly they were used to get around quickly to designate targets for airstrikes, but they were also ridden into combat.
Don't the South Koreans have some of those newfangled anti-artillery radars? How many volleys could they manage to push through their barrels before their positions get obliterated by counterfire?
Perhaps, but even one volley would mean an awful lot of death and destruction in Seoul, which has one of the highest population densities of any city in the world. Also, even if the artillery positions are immediately determined (or perhaps already known, as another responder suggested), they can only be taken out quickly if South Korea has guns in place and on alert to perform counterbattery fire, or has aircraft loitering above. Otherwise they have to take the time to bring their own artillery into position and/or arm and launch airstrikes. The NK fire could easily drive deaths above the 10,000 level in that time. Taking out the NK guns/launchers ahead of time would be the best course (if it can be done quickly and all at once, because any that are missed will be firing at Seoul), but unless overt hostilities have already broken out, that won't be a politically-viable option.
I agree that no one's rights are being violated here -- this is just the free market at work. It does, however, speak poorly of boycotters' ability to deal with the fact that there are people in the world who disagree with them. It is, essentially, a secularized version of the religious impulse to stamp out heresy.
Do you (general you, not parent post author) really want to reduce your consumption of books, movies, etc. to only those from people you agree with? How many techies are fans of the works of Tolkien, who was famously anti-technology? I love the Elric saga, even though Michael Moorcock is a Marxist, an ideology I find utterly vile. I totally disagree with Hayao Miyazaki's pacifism and anti-nuclear views, yet I can enjoy his anime just fine. Etc. Etc.
May 1 is 'International Day of the Worker', and is celebrated in many countries around the world. It was originally a Soviet holiday, so of course most Americans have never heard of it.
Actually, it pre-dates the USSR by almost two decades. It was established by the Socialist Second International in 1889, to commemorate what was called the Haymarket Affair in Chicago a few years before. Most folks I know are quite aware what May Day is, though of course that's not a random sample, and I expect most of them assume (as did you) that it is Soviet in origin. You need a little less of the attitude embodied in your sig.
In 1994, San Francisco decided to close public schools on Lunar New Year, but this was largely a response to demographic reality rather than political pressure.
Which is as it should be, and an indicator that federalism is working just fine, thank you very much. In an area where lots of people want to take the same day off, it's off. Otherwise, it's not. Heck, we could make Nooruz (Persian New Year) a national holiday, but I doubt there's a demand for that anywhere except in certain parts of Los Angeles. It would be nice for the various Slavic and Greek enclaves around the US if their New Year (based on the Julian rather than Gregorian calendar) was a national holiday. We could make Rosh Hashanah a national holiday, along with at least half a dozen different New Year days from India (it depends on the region). Etc. Etc. Etc.
It's one thing to be respectful of minority groups, and for everyone to have the same legal rights regardless of ethnicity, religion, etc. That's as it should be. But it's an entirely-different thing to bend over backwards pretending that there are no minorities. I wouldn't expect to get Christmas off if I lived in China, nor would it be any kind of insult or malign discrimination on China's part if I didn't.
I knew that when I posted it. Blame the scriptwriter, not me!
Kit: The letter K appears in this script 1,456 times. That's perfectly divisible by 3.
Freddy: So what? So what you saying?
Kit: What am I saying? KKK appears in this script 486 times!
No, the death of Ned Agha-Soltan is widely disputed.
Disputed? Yes. Widely? No. It's disputed by the mullahs and their supporters. Who, incidentally, have banned prayers for her, and are probably responsible for repeatedly descrating her grave.
I should also mention that dehumanization of Muslims is a nasty policy and that has nothing to do with criticism. It's used a part of harassment policy that Muslims face in the west and also a tool for covering up everyday killings of Muslim civilians in Pakistan, Afghanistan and many other countries. When they are call animals (monkeys, etc) who cares about many of them who are killed by US attacks everyday by various weapons ranging from rifles to missiles and drones.
Funny, none of my relatives in the US (some Muslims, and some who aren't but would likely be assumed to be Muslims due to their ethnicity) have ever, to my knowledge, been harassed at all. If anything, when the subject has come up, they're rather less worried about it than most people. And the "Ahmadinejad is a monkey" meme originated in Iran.
What I liked especially is that it inverts the usual dynamic of most "some person(s) use something to cause a disaster" stories. For most of them, the initial part of the story involves the antagonists trying to acquire or learn how to create the mechanism to cause the disaster -- a bomb, a plague, nerve gas, friggin' laser beams, whatever -- and the protagonist is trying to stop them from getting/creating the mechanism, and failing that, from using it. Here, we start with someone who already has the necessarily knowledge, who then turns into an antagonist via an external influence.
Another good novel (written when genetic engineering was fairly new) is The White Plague , written by Frank Herbert of Dune fame. Basic premise (not really spoilers, since as I recall this is on the book's back cover): an expert molecular biologist, otherwise sane and benevolent, cracks when his wife and daughter are killed in a terrorist attack. He creates a highly contagious virus that is lethal to women but harmless to men, and lets it loose in the countries he considers responsible, so that the men there will share his loss. Then he threatens to do so elsewhere if the rest of the world doesn't send all immigrants from those countries back home and let the plague run its course.
Don't know how plausible it is scientifically, but it's a good read, like all of Herbert's stuff. Well, like all of his stuff before God Emperor of Dune...
Mr Emami is an Iranian. Whom speake like that about president of his mother's country, is not a reach human. Who could beleive to this kind of humans.
It's my dad's country, actually, though I did live there for a while -- specifically, I was there when Khomeini took over, so I got to see the before and after versions, and whatever the Shah's faults, what replaced him is much, much worse.
As to humanity, ask Neda Agha-Soltan... oh, wait, you can't, she was shot by a basiji during the 2009 demonstrations. Perhaps you can ask Farrokhroo Parsa, then... no, she was executed by the mullahs for the crime of being appointed Minister of Education by the Shah. Not the head of SAVAK or the army or the police, not responsible for the death or injury of anyone, just the Minister of Education, the first woman cabinet minister ever in Iran. How about asking Mona Mahmudnizhad... oops, can't do that, she was executed along with nine other Iranian women by the mullahs in 1983 for the crime of being a Baha'i.
And as for criticizing a country's president, well, that's an everyday occurence in a free country. No matter how much I supported or respected a US president, I would never call someone "not human" for criticizing him. Heck, back in High School, I had a teacher who mocked the president every chance he got, but all I did was laugh at him (outside of class, of course). And come to think of it, he never got arrested or fired. How very strange, huh?
One major difference: other religions don't sue you for quoting their writings. When was the last time someone got sued for publishing passages of the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the Koran, the Upanishads, or the Buddhavacana? What other religions claim to have legally-enforceable trade secrets?
Mind you, I'm a little bit biased here. For several years I worked at a business whose management was made up almost entirely of Scientologists. There's nothing wrong with that per se -- if you start a small business, you're likely to give jobs to people you know, and if you're religious, then it's likely a lot of people you know go to your church. However, they ran things using what's called "Hubbard Management Technology", which is really just a thinly-veiled rebranding of Scientology itself. Again, there's nothing wrong with using one's religion as an ethical guide at work -- "thou shalt not steal -> don't bill clients for more hours than it took", for example. But this stuff was all-pervasive, including advocating "sue your critics to shut them up", how proper training should be conducted, assigning employees positions on the Scientology "conditions" scale and making them do "rehabilitation projects" if they weren't high enough (luckily they never tried that on non-Scientologist employees), decisions on how to do safety classes (always done by a chiropractor due to Scientologist opinions on regular doctors), etc. There was also a lot of silly cargo-cult stuff, basically "Hubbard did this when running his church, so we have to do it that way now." Hubbard reviewed stats on Thursday? We have to do stats on Thursday. Hubbard used certain color marks on different types of memos? We have to use those colors on our memos. It's basically akin to a Christian coming up with a "Jesus Management Technology", with rules like "your company has to have twelve departments, because Jesus had twelve apostles. Also, the water in the drinking fountains must be either hot or cold, but not lukewarm."
One non-sinister incident, which we programmers (non-Scientologists all) found hilarious at the time: We were working towards releasing a new version, and keeping track of the daily open bug count as we fixed things. To give us an idea of our progress, we had a line graph on a whiteboard. Company president comes in, looks at the graph, and frowns. Apparently, there's a Scientology rule somewhere that when you make a graph, "good" must be "up." (They set enormous store by "stats"). Obviously, bugs are bad, so having more bugs be higher on the graph than fewer bugs is wrong verging on blasphemy. He then proceeds to carefully redraw our graph with the Y-axis inverted, 0 at the top, and the previous peak bug count at the bottom of the whiteboard, so that as bugs were fixed we'd be "up-stat", and the graph would go "up" towards a bug-free release. Objections from us were met with a firm "no, no, you have to draw it like that" -- but in a nice, gentle way, as if we programmers just didn't have the deep understanding of such things that trained Scientologists do. We went along with it, along with much chuckling among ourselves, until the testers started in on a major feature they hadn't gone over yet -- and the bug count went higher than the previous maximum, so that drawing the graph would now involve drawing lines on the air below the whiteboard.
Actually, Ahmadinejad usually is depicted as a monkey in the expatriate Iranian press, and (so I hear from relatives there) commonly referred to as such in Iran by a lot of folks. There was even an incident a few years ago where a girl on a kid's TV show innocently mentioned that her dad had nicknamed her toy monkey after the guy. Part of it is due to perceived physical resemblance, and part due to the belief that he doesn't actually wield independent power but is just Supreme Leader Khamenei's "trained pet."
They have also contributed to the Linux kernel.
That's a bit deceptive. Microsoft contributed code needed for its VMs to host Linux, nothing more.
If they contributed, they contributed. Does it matter that they did so because there is a demand for their VMs to run Linux, rather than out of the goodness of their hearts? One of the benefits of having something be open source is that numerous different parties can fix bugs or add functionality that may (per consensus) improve the project, but which only one party has the time, knowledge, and motivation for. For folks other than the project's core developers, that motivation will often be "I need it to do X" not "I want to help everyone who uses this and promote open source software."
It doesn't help that even the wider international community applies the double standard of congratulating most countries on their space programmes while condemning NK. Why would India be allowed such a programme when NK isn't? Why should the US for that matter?
Because both India and the US are democracies, and North Korea is not. Same goes for France and the UK. I would have zero problem with, say, South Korea or Poland or Australia having nukes, or if South Africa decided they wanted them again. Unfortunately there's nothing that can be done about the PRC having them, but ideally, only democracies should have nuclear weapons.
In fact, it's misleading to speak of NK or other dictatorships as countries in the same sense as democracies, in this question and in others, because that implies we're talking about what the people of those countries want and what they have a right to do. The question is not "why should India have nukes but not NK?" The question is "Why should President Mukherjee of India have control of a nuclear arsenal, but not Kim Jong-un of North Korea?" Well, because President Mukherjee was voted his authority by 700+ million Indians (~70%), while Kim Jong-un inherited his authority and continues to wield it because, for the high-ranking officials who count, showing anything less than absolute support means trading your perks for a firing squad. I don't put the decisions of free Indian citizens on the same moral plane as those of North Korean generals.