One of the writer's theses was that part of what put an end to the initial flowering of scientific and medical research was the Islamic ban on any images of the human body. This puts a severe limit on how far you can go with medical texts. It's a conventional explanation of why, though the Arabs were ahead of Europe in medical knowledge 1000 years ago, the Europeans eventually caught up and passed them. You really can't have good medical texts without lots of images. There was also resistance to medical texts in Europe for a long time, due to all the "pornographic" images. But eventually this was ended and medical texts were made exceptions from the porn laws, to everyone's benefit.
In Saudi Arabia, the Beetle Bailey newspaper comic strip is censored daily by someone with a felt-tip pen who gives the general's secretary a long-sleeved floor-length dress. If the answer to a crossword puzzle clue is something like "wine" or "beer", the clue itself is blacked out. This is clearly a nation that takes its censorship seriously.
But you can go to any large Riyadh bookstore in the evening and observe red-faced Saudi teenagers giggling over the anatomical images in the medical text section. So if there is such a prohibition, it's expired.
If this is implemented correctly, then they should force all *legal* porn sites to use an.xxx domain
Who is "they", and why would governments of comparatively free countries go along with it?
Let's assume ICANN says, "All porn must be in.xxx," and the Swedish government says, "Go fly a kite, any Swede can register anything they want in.se, bork bork bork."
What happens next? ICANN turns control of.se over to the Baptist church? The US invades and gives Haliburton a contract to run of Sweden's name servers?
So you think a.xxx TLD is stupid, huh? And the arguments you provide apply equally against the creation of any new domain, or any domain other than.com.
No they don't.
The purpose of.museum is to make it easier to find museums.
The purpose of.aero is to make it easier to find aerodromes and aerogrammes and cures for aerosinusitis.
The purpose of.gov is to make it easier to find government stuff.
The purpose of.xxx is to make it harder to find porn.
These classifications are arguably useful for making it easier to find things. Unless one accepts the ludicrous proposition that pornographers have been waiting all these years for a way to make it harder to access their web sites, and.xxx is their ship finally come in, then using a classification to make it harder to find things is quite a different problem.
As a Christian (aka "Religous wacko")... Porn is degrading to women, and it does destroys relationships.
Sensible lines of argument, so long as you don't proceed to then advocate banning this and all other things that might damage relationships. However...
By having a ".xxx" domain, I can set my firewall to instantly block all of the porn in the world.
Is this the same way I can instantly block all English-language content in the world by setting my firewall to filter the ".uk" domain? You do understand the voluntary nature of domain registration, right?
Also, I'm curious: You would block this content because you believe your relationship would be destroyed if you saw any of it? Couldn't you just choose not to look?
My relationship would probably be destroyed if I started playing some addictive video game around the clock, 7 days a week. But my response is not to install all sorts of filters preventing me from accessing video games. My response is to exercise self-control. What hath made you so much weaker than I, who am basically an ordinary schmoe?
Why do we have any TLDs? We can just shove everything into.com right? The point is to organize the internet into usable chunks both for content providers and consumers. Now I don't know about you, but I'd say porn makes up a significant chunk of the internet. Porn providers want consumers to easily be able to find them. They don't want young children to find them since kids generally don't have credit cards and if they do their parents look at the bills and likely will complain.
They also don't want to be filtered out if it keeps potentially useful paying customers from reaching them. And exiling themselves to.xxx would do just that.
Look, we have.net and.org and all that, and nobody pays any attention at all even though they are actually sort of useful distinctions. In the face of that, do you really think pornographers, of all people, would suddenly get all fastidious about TLDs and back themselves into a corner where half their audience can't get to them?
They don't want people who don't like porn visiting them since it costs them bandwidth and is more likely to result in outrage/persecution of them.
However, they do want to try to convert some of those people into people who have suddenly discovered that they actually do like porn. The more explicit effort is required to make that discovery, the fewer people will achieve it.
It will stop all of the "please think of the children" emotive pleas, since anyone concerned can just filter the XXX domain. This is the whole reason the domain system exists.
Huh? What's the whole reason the domain system exists? Stopping "please think of the children" pleas? Filtering out content? All this is news to me.
Having an XXX domain gives porn purveyors a place to go where no one can complain they "accidentally" stumbled upon them.
Such complaints are the least of their worries. They want to make money, not pamper delicate sensibilities. Any appearance of such pandering is an act to placate adversaries. When the pandering gets in the way of making money, it stops. Once again, remember that you are talking about pornographers, not as a class known to be the most society-minded people.
If a.xxx domain is ever created the legal climate in the US will force any content that isn't 'child safe' into it. All it would take is one threat of a lawsuit from a rapacious trial lawyer (and we have a couple million of those monsters lurking here) and any site that wasn't perfectly safe for kiddies would move.
There is more than enough porn outside the reach of US courtrooms to render this whole scenario moot.
Even if whitehouse.com is gone, there'll still be nächtescheissenfresser.com and boobyspanker.th and buttpotato.uk and all the rest. And I imagine this argument would be made during your hypothetical case.
Hopefully for the company, this means it will now have the French government's lucrative preferential contracting support combined with Lucent's ability to sometimes make quality stuff, and not the other way around. Because the Alcatel gear is truly shitty in a level all to its own, at least with the PABXs etc that I have had to deal with.
Topping up your Octopus card is quick too. And life sucks without a loaded Octopus card. Though I suppose if you want to stay anonymous you're better off recharging with cash at 7-Eleven.
I have heard several people make a statement like this and I want to know: where the hell are they are eating their other meals at? For a good home cooked meal it always takes me about a half hour to an hour (and even longer for roasts and some soups). For good sit down restaurants in my area it is many times a 20 minute wait for seating, a ten minute wait for drinks, and ten to 20 minute wait for food. At the fast food places it is 10 minutes tops, maybe 20 if there is a REALLY long line.
At a down-home Chinese place you should be able to get a dish in 5 minutes. They wok that stuff up fast.
What the hell? Who the hell wants to pay to recieve calls?
Anyone who wants to pay less for using the telephone.
In the US, Singapore, and China (and maybe a few others), the cost for both placing and receiving a call is borne by the mobile phone user. This has had the effect of bringing down the total cost of using mobile phones, which is good for consumers.
The reason for this is obvious if you consider what happens in the caller-pays system as found in Europe: If I want to call your mobile from my phone, I have to pay a surcharge levied by your mobile operator. If I don't like that surcharge, I have no option except to stop calling you. I cannot switch you to another carrier that offers a lower charge. And calling a specific person tends to be price-inelastic. So there is no downward competitive pressure on the inbound call rate to mobile phones.
As a consequence, the inbound rate is huge in Europe, whereas in the USA, people will switch to a different provider (also aided by number portability) if their current provider tries to be too greedy on incoming calls. Look at wholesale termination rates (given below in US$).
Country Landline Mobile
USA 0.0080 0.0080
Singapore 0.0102 0.0113
China 0.0155 0.0175
France 0.0140 0.1700
Germany 0.0115 0.2625
UK 0.0128 0.1838
Uruguay 0.0790 0.2444
Australia 0.0168 0.2122
Zambia 0.0750 0.1449
As you can see, the mobile termination rates in caller-pays countries are often more than ten times higher than landline termination rates (this is more pronounced in rich countries). At the same time, mobile origination rates in receiver-pays countries are nowhere near that high. So it's the Europeans getting screwed, smug as they are about how great it is to have free incoming calls. It really only works for people who always receive and never place calls, which obviously isn't that many people or else there'd be no point in having the phones.
BTW, I'm surprised to hear you say that there were no theaters in Asia - when I was in Thailand in ~1994, there were theaters. I remember La Femme Nikita was big then.
Well, the period I describe is well after 1994. It was only when VCD/DVD piracy entered its heyday that the effect became pronounced.
Almost all of the cinemas I remember from 1994 are gone now, torn down or converted to shops. An awful lot of them closed before they started getting replaced by the new fancy ones. There was a period when it seemed like the trajectory was towards none at all.
Greetings from piracy ground zero (southeast Asia). The day a movie comes out in the cinema anywhere, I can find it at any of dozens of shops within a 10-minute walk of my home on DVD for US$2. The quality is bad for the first few weeks, but the shopkeepers are honest about it, and customers can decide whether it's worth waiting for a better version.
Hollywood studios used to release films months later here than in the US. Absolutely everyone watched the pirated ones, and cinemas were empty, closing down left and right.
Now they do simultaneous release (US and Asia), there is a new breed of cinemas with reclining seats and über-THX Dolby what-have-you, tickets are US$2.50, and films don't stay in the cinema longer than 2 or 3 weeks (this is easier than in the west because there is a far wider range of films to show - in addition to all the American movies they show Hong Kong, Korean, Indian, Japanese stuff, subtitled into 2 or 3 languages depending on the source).
It seems to be working. The cinemas are crowded - last show at the big ones in town is after midnight and even then there are a lot of sold-out screens. The first week a popular movie is out, the only way you're going to see it in the evening is if you make a reservation online or via mobile. People go to the movies for the experience, because the experience is genuinely different from watching at home. And then when the supply of people who want that experience is tapped out, they leave it to the pirates.
So I really don't think the availability of DVDs is cannibalising the cinemas' market. Or if it is, they have successfully adapted to it.
Granted, I've never seen a legit DVD for sale here and I couldn't imagine where to go to find one, but I guess not everyone can be a winner.
First off, I think the question isn't that realistic. Too much commerce depends on global connectivity, and it's not really in the interest of any significant power structure to change that.
But to answer the question:
In smaller countries I think international connectivity is particularly important. Aside from chat/IM, here in Malaysia people spend almost all of their online time surfing foreign sites. English speakers mainly hit the US, and a bit of UK and Australia, while Chinese speakers are on the Hong Kong and Taiwan sites. There's not enough critical mass to build up that much local community content; a few tech sites like lowyat.net and a bunch of blogs, but mostly people are on yahoo groups, etc. The fact that most Malaysians are near-fluent or fluent in one or more major world languages like English and Chinese exacerbates this. (Note on English fluency: Fluent when they want to be. On the lowyat.net forums you'll be reading SMS-speak-influenced Manglish, a clipped, rhythmic flavour of English spiced heavily with words from Malay and various Chinese dialects)
At the same time, clearly American companies are making money at this. Ad syndication programs are showing me Malaysian banner ads when I surf global sites like Yahoo. Amazon.com ships so much stuff here there's a special room in the main post office in Kuala Lumpur just for collecting your Amazon orders. US companies like Fedex, Motorola, Kelloggs, and Citibank do a lot of business here and host their ".com.my" web sites in the US which is more efficient for them.
In fact, due to the more competitive American hosting market, an awful lot of nominally Malaysian sites are actually hosted in the US. When I want to look up the online menu for the restaurant down the street, my web traffic goes all the way around the world.
By now, in places like this anyway, things are so interdependent that an internet with national borders would be unthinkable. I doubt anyone would bother to use it.
Being able to laugh at your own misfortune, even along with others, is quite different from laughing at the pain of others when they themselves quite likely don't think it funny. Specifically, different in a sociopathic kind of way.
Well, actually it's quite normal to laugh at unpleasant things that happen to others. It's a way of coping with the discomfort. And since it is normal behavior, it is by definition not sociopathic.
It is sad that this has to be explained.
Agreed. If there's anything that needs a mumbo-jumbo pop psychology affliction label these days, it's humourlessness.
A design firm where only 17% of the employees are designers? Maybe if the others had Macs they'd get more work done and you wouldn't need such a bloated payroll.
Thanks darien and belmolis - I don't know nearly enough about Indian languages (a shame since many of my neighbors speak Tamil and I love the sound of it), always happy to learn a little more.
Except if Indians start using roman letters, I believe translation is opened... therefore, Gandi, Ghandi and Gandhi, as long as they sounds the same, are conceptually equal, and should be considered as such.
They don't sound the same.
GH is a softer sound than G.
DH is a softer sound than D, pronounced with the tongue flatter against the roof of the mouth.
In Hindi, I believe that D and G without the softening 'H" simply don't exist (but could be wrong). In Arabic, 'D' and 'DH' are completely different letters, likewise 'G' (Egyptian, anyway) and 'GH'. Baghdad is not pronounced Bagdad; the GH should sound like a French R. They aren't any more the same than 'Mop" and 'Top' are.
There are alot of brilliant Iranians outside Iran I have met that could steer their country in a better direction.
This is both good news and bad news.
On the one hand, Iran is a highly-educated society that values learning and knowledge, which I think is important for sensible political development.
On the other hand, the fact that you've met so many such people is a symptom of the brain drain that has been going on for decades now. Smart, capable Iranians leave the country, because their talents are better appreciated elsewhere. By now, it's been so long that many of them aren't so concerned about going back; they're happy in their new homes and their new homes are happy with them. If the drain continues, the only people remaining in the country with any interest in public policy will be the misanthropic thugs who run things now.
You have to understand that for Islamic countries, these sort of laws are the norm. My Iranian friend doesn't like his government and He was actually pointing out funny things you will see in an islamic country (that being said, he doesn't want a US invasion under any terms). Like it is forbidden for a man to kiss a woman if they are not engaged. Even actors on TV 'pass out' when the kissing part comes. These fanatical believes are deaply entrenched in islamic countries and as the link you provided me clearly shows, even the US invasion didn't change this much.
Iran is a bad example, if you are claiming that radical Islam has deep, long-standing support. 27 years ago you could kiss anyone you felt like.
When the revolution happened, the people of Iran thought they were getting a moral alternative to a highly corrupt system (the American-backed Shah). Eventually they discovered they had turned themselves over to an even more corrupt - and less permissive - regime, which still stands today. By the time Iranians woke up and realised they'd been sold a bill of goods, it was too late to simply change their minds and take it back. Perhaps it will take another revolution.
The amount of money the porn lords make from the.com names would decrease. Being greedy, I would notice that the return from my dot com porn sites is no longer as high as it was in the pre.xxx days. So, I would end up dropping.coms from my portfolio.
This is why we don't invite you to the porn lord meetings anymore. In order for your statement to make sense, you'd have to make less than $5/year on your.com domain. So your porn must really suck ass. And I don't mean literally.
My fellow porn lords and I would buy.xxx domains, but we would not give up our.com domains. We want as much business as we can get. At $5/year for a.com domain, I have very little to lose by sitting on both, and a whole lot to gain.
So while I am certain a lot of porn would appear in.xxx, the claim that it would "migrate" there remains highly improbable to me. Basically the only result of.xxx would be that porn would be easier to find than ever.
The amount of money made by.com porn sites would decrease because the new.TLD split the market.
Ah, I see the problem. You didn't know that two different domains can point to the same site, without requiring any extra cables or internet valves.
There's this new search engine competing with www.google.com, you can find it at www.google.biz. I wonder how long before the www.google.com people go after them for copyright infringement. Sit back and watch the fireworks!
The Bible (and therefore in the Christian mindset, God) teaches sex as an act between one man and one woman and reserved for a marriage. It is intended to be something sacred and private, intended to help a man and a woman achieve a deeper level of intimacy in their marriage. The sex described or implied in Song of Solomon is between a woman and her husband. Pornography violates this Scriptural context by taking sex outside the marriage bed and displaying it for all the world to see, whether through magazines or screens.
More of the same rationalization. The sex described in the Song of Solomon is the same as pornography except that it is in words instead of pictures, and a little more metaphor than we tend to employ these days. All of this comes down to technical limitations and stylistic considerations.
I mean, for Pete's sake, have you ever actually read it?
Your two breasts are like two fawns,
like twin fawns of a gazelle
that browse among the lilies.
...
Awake, north wind,
and come, south wind!
Blow on my garden,
that its fragrance may spread abroad.
Let my lover come into his garden
and taste its choice fruits.
...
I said, "I will climb the palm tree;
I will take hold of its fruit."
May your breasts be like the clusters of the vine,
the fragrance of your breath like apples,
and your mouth like the best wine.
...
Let us go early to the vineyards
to see if the vines have budded,
if their blossoms have opened,
and if the pomegranates are in bloom--
there I will give you my love.
...
Come away, my lover,
and be like a gazelle
or like a young stag
on the spice-laden mountains.
Slashdot Mirror
In Saudi Arabia, the Beetle Bailey newspaper comic strip is censored daily by someone with a felt-tip pen who gives the general's secretary a long-sleeved floor-length dress. If the answer to a crossword puzzle clue is something like "wine" or "beer", the clue itself is blacked out. This is clearly a nation that takes its censorship seriously.
But you can go to any large Riyadh bookstore in the evening and observe red-faced Saudi teenagers giggling over the anatomical images in the medical text section. So if there is such a prohibition, it's expired.
Why? How? By whom? What sort of global reach does your putative impressionist have?
Who is "they", and why would governments of comparatively free countries go along with it?
Let's assume ICANN says, "All porn must be in .xxx," and the Swedish government says, "Go fly a kite, any Swede can register anything they want in .se, bork bork bork."
What happens next? ICANN turns control of .se over to the Baptist church? The US invades and gives Haliburton a contract to run of Sweden's name servers?
No they don't.
The purpose of .museum is to make it easier to find museums.
The purpose of .aero is to make it easier to find aerodromes and aerogrammes and cures for aerosinusitis.
The purpose of .gov is to make it easier to find government stuff.
The purpose of .xxx is to make it harder to find porn.
These classifications are arguably useful for making it easier to find things. Unless one accepts the ludicrous proposition that pornographers have been waiting all these years for a way to make it harder to access their web sites, and .xxx is their ship finally come in, then using a classification to make it harder to find things is quite a different problem.
Sensible lines of argument, so long as you don't proceed to then advocate banning this and all other things that might damage relationships. However...
Is this the same way I can instantly block all English-language content in the world by setting my firewall to filter the ".uk" domain? You do understand the voluntary nature of domain registration, right?
Also, I'm curious: You would block this content because you believe your relationship would be destroyed if you saw any of it? Couldn't you just choose not to look?
My relationship would probably be destroyed if I started playing some addictive video game around the clock, 7 days a week. But my response is not to install all sorts of filters preventing me from accessing video games. My response is to exercise self-control. What hath made you so much weaker than I, who am basically an ordinary schmoe?
They also don't want to be filtered out if it keeps potentially useful paying customers from reaching them. And exiling themselves to .xxx would do just that.
Look, we have .net and .org and all that, and nobody pays any attention at all even though they are actually sort of useful distinctions. In the face of that, do you really think pornographers, of all people, would suddenly get all fastidious about TLDs and back themselves into a corner where half their audience can't get to them?
However, they do want to try to convert some of those people into people who have suddenly discovered that they actually do like porn. The more explicit effort is required to make that discovery, the fewer people will achieve it.
Huh? What's the whole reason the domain system exists? Stopping "please think of the children" pleas? Filtering out content? All this is news to me.
Such complaints are the least of their worries. They want to make money, not pamper delicate sensibilities. Any appearance of such pandering is an act to placate adversaries. When the pandering gets in the way of making money, it stops. Once again, remember that you are talking about pornographers, not as a class known to be the most society-minded people.
There is more than enough porn outside the reach of US courtrooms to render this whole scenario moot.
Even if whitehouse.com is gone, there'll still be nächtescheissenfresser.com and boobyspanker.th and buttpotato.uk and all the rest. And I imagine this argument would be made during your hypothetical case.
Hopefully for the company, this means it will now have the French government's lucrative preferential contracting support combined with Lucent's ability to sometimes make quality stuff, and not the other way around. Because the Alcatel gear is truly shitty in a level all to its own, at least with the PABXs etc that I have had to deal with.
Topping up your Octopus card is quick too. And life sucks without a loaded Octopus card. Though I suppose if you want to stay anonymous you're better off recharging with cash at 7-Eleven.
At a down-home Chinese place you should be able to get a dish in 5 minutes. They wok that stuff up fast.
Anyone who wants to pay less for using the telephone.
In the US, Singapore, and China (and maybe a few others), the cost for both placing and receiving a call is borne by the mobile phone user. This has had the effect of bringing down the total cost of using mobile phones, which is good for consumers.
The reason for this is obvious if you consider what happens in the caller-pays system as found in Europe: If I want to call your mobile from my phone, I have to pay a surcharge levied by your mobile operator. If I don't like that surcharge, I have no option except to stop calling you. I cannot switch you to another carrier that offers a lower charge. And calling a specific person tends to be price-inelastic. So there is no downward competitive pressure on the inbound call rate to mobile phones.
As a consequence, the inbound rate is huge in Europe, whereas in the USA, people will switch to a different provider (also aided by number portability) if their current provider tries to be too greedy on incoming calls. Look at wholesale termination rates (given below in US$).
Country Landline MobileUSA 0.0080 0.0080
Singapore 0.0102 0.0113
China 0.0155 0.0175
France 0.0140 0.1700
Germany 0.0115 0.2625
UK 0.0128 0.1838
Uruguay 0.0790 0.2444
Australia 0.0168 0.2122
Zambia 0.0750 0.1449
As you can see, the mobile termination rates in caller-pays countries are often more than ten times higher than landline termination rates (this is more pronounced in rich countries). At the same time, mobile origination rates in receiver-pays countries are nowhere near that high. So it's the Europeans getting screwed, smug as they are about how great it is to have free incoming calls. It really only works for people who always receive and never place calls, which obviously isn't that many people or else there'd be no point in having the phones.
Well, the period I describe is well after 1994. It was only when VCD/DVD piracy entered its heyday that the effect became pronounced.
Almost all of the cinemas I remember from 1994 are gone now, torn down or converted to shops. An awful lot of them closed before they started getting replaced by the new fancy ones. There was a period when it seemed like the trajectory was towards none at all.
I wonder why they don't just use normal text.
Greetings from piracy ground zero (southeast Asia). The day a movie comes out in the cinema anywhere, I can find it at any of dozens of shops within a 10-minute walk of my home on DVD for US$2. The quality is bad for the first few weeks, but the shopkeepers are honest about it, and customers can decide whether it's worth waiting for a better version.
Hollywood studios used to release films months later here than in the US. Absolutely everyone watched the pirated ones, and cinemas were empty, closing down left and right.
Now they do simultaneous release (US and Asia), there is a new breed of cinemas with reclining seats and über-THX Dolby what-have-you, tickets are US$2.50, and films don't stay in the cinema longer than 2 or 3 weeks (this is easier than in the west because there is a far wider range of films to show - in addition to all the American movies they show Hong Kong, Korean, Indian, Japanese stuff, subtitled into 2 or 3 languages depending on the source).
It seems to be working. The cinemas are crowded - last show at the big ones in town is after midnight and even then there are a lot of sold-out screens. The first week a popular movie is out, the only way you're going to see it in the evening is if you make a reservation online or via mobile. People go to the movies for the experience, because the experience is genuinely different from watching at home. And then when the supply of people who want that experience is tapped out, they leave it to the pirates.
So I really don't think the availability of DVDs is cannibalising the cinemas' market. Or if it is, they have successfully adapted to it.
Granted, I've never seen a legit DVD for sale here and I couldn't imagine where to go to find one, but I guess not everyone can be a winner.
Apple has a helpful page detailing what to do in order to get your pages to continue working as usual with IE.
First off, I think the question isn't that realistic. Too much commerce depends on global connectivity, and it's not really in the interest of any significant power structure to change that.
But to answer the question:
In smaller countries I think international connectivity is particularly important. Aside from chat/IM, here in Malaysia people spend almost all of their online time surfing foreign sites. English speakers mainly hit the US, and a bit of UK and Australia, while Chinese speakers are on the Hong Kong and Taiwan sites. There's not enough critical mass to build up that much local community content; a few tech sites like lowyat.net and a bunch of blogs, but mostly people are on yahoo groups, etc. The fact that most Malaysians are near-fluent or fluent in one or more major world languages like English and Chinese exacerbates this. (Note on English fluency: Fluent when they want to be. On the lowyat.net forums you'll be reading SMS-speak-influenced Manglish, a clipped, rhythmic flavour of English spiced heavily with words from Malay and various Chinese dialects)
At the same time, clearly American companies are making money at this. Ad syndication programs are showing me Malaysian banner ads when I surf global sites like Yahoo. Amazon.com ships so much stuff here there's a special room in the main post office in Kuala Lumpur just for collecting your Amazon orders. US companies like Fedex, Motorola, Kelloggs, and Citibank do a lot of business here and host their ".com.my" web sites in the US which is more efficient for them.
In fact, due to the more competitive American hosting market, an awful lot of nominally Malaysian sites are actually hosted in the US. When I want to look up the online menu for the restaurant down the street, my web traffic goes all the way around the world.
By now, in places like this anyway, things are so interdependent that an internet with national borders would be unthinkable. I doubt anyone would bother to use it.
Well, actually it's quite normal to laugh at unpleasant things that happen to others. It's a way of coping with the discomfort. And since it is normal behavior, it is by definition not sociopathic.
Agreed. If there's anything that needs a mumbo-jumbo pop psychology affliction label these days, it's humourlessness.
A design firm where only 17% of the employees are designers? Maybe if the others had Macs they'd get more work done and you wouldn't need such a bloated payroll.
Thanks darien and belmolis - I don't know nearly enough about Indian languages (a shame since many of my neighbors speak Tamil and I love the sound of it), always happy to learn a little more.
They don't sound the same.
GH is a softer sound than G.
DH is a softer sound than D, pronounced with the tongue flatter against the roof of the mouth.
In Hindi, I believe that D and G without the softening 'H" simply don't exist (but could be wrong). In Arabic, 'D' and 'DH' are completely different letters, likewise 'G' (Egyptian, anyway) and 'GH'. Baghdad is not pronounced Bagdad; the GH should sound like a French R. They aren't any more the same than 'Mop" and 'Top' are.
This is both good news and bad news.
On the one hand, Iran is a highly-educated society that values learning and knowledge, which I think is important for sensible political development.
On the other hand, the fact that you've met so many such people is a symptom of the brain drain that has been going on for decades now. Smart, capable Iranians leave the country, because their talents are better appreciated elsewhere. By now, it's been so long that many of them aren't so concerned about going back; they're happy in their new homes and their new homes are happy with them. If the drain continues, the only people remaining in the country with any interest in public policy will be the misanthropic thugs who run things now.
Iran is a bad example, if you are claiming that radical Islam has deep, long-standing support. 27 years ago you could kiss anyone you felt like.
When the revolution happened, the people of Iran thought they were getting a moral alternative to a highly corrupt system (the American-backed Shah). Eventually they discovered they had turned themselves over to an even more corrupt - and less permissive - regime, which still stands today. By the time Iranians woke up and realised they'd been sold a bill of goods, it was too late to simply change their minds and take it back. Perhaps it will take another revolution.
This is why we don't invite you to the porn lord meetings anymore. In order for your statement to make sense, you'd have to make less than $5/year on your .com domain. So your porn must really suck ass. And I don't mean literally.
My fellow porn lords and I would buy .xxx domains, but we would not give up our .com domains. We want as much business as we can get. At $5/year for a .com domain, I have very little to lose by sitting on both, and a whole lot to gain.
So while I am certain a lot of porn would appear in .xxx, the claim that it would "migrate" there remains highly improbable to me. Basically the only result of .xxx would be that porn would be easier to find than ever.
Ah, I see the problem. You didn't know that two different domains can point to the same site, without requiring any extra cables or internet valves.
There's this new search engine competing with www.google.com, you can find it at www.google.biz. I wonder how long before the www.google.com people go after them for copyright infringement. Sit back and watch the fireworks!
Why on earth (leaving the aside your astounding implicit claims about the autonomy of pornography) would it do that?
More of the same rationalization. The sex described in the Song of Solomon is the same as pornography except that it is in words instead of pictures, and a little more metaphor than we tend to employ these days. All of this comes down to technical limitations and stylistic considerations.
I mean, for Pete's sake, have you ever actually read it?
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