Didn't know that one! Yes, I see the singular is Huriya and is indeed feminine. And it's a more accurate noun than the three masculine ones I referenced, since it refers to an actual virgin of paradise, versus, say, a Slashdotter.
I know of three words for virgin in Arabic, and they are actually all masculine nouns: bikr, batool, 3thraa'. (Still cannot submit Arabic characters on Slashdot, in 2008.)
On the other hand, the Arabic word for caliph is feminine (i.e., ends in a taa' marbuTa) but refers, of course, to a man.
I wonder if that means the iPod will start supporting Arabic, if there really is such an emerging market in the ME. There were rumors about Arabic language support back in Jan 2006, I believe, but so far nothing.
The iTunes application does support Arabic, but when you sync the music to the iPod, you just see a blank space where the song name would go.
Someone did hack together Hebrew support on the iPod, which tackles the RTL problem, but Arabic needs to be written in cursive, with all the letters connected. It's a solvable rendering problem, but to date, Apple has obviously not felt it to be worth the candle.
I checked out the demo video for the Kindle on Amazon today. About 15 seconds into it, they zoom into the Kindle to show the text on the screen. It's a page from Stephenson's Diamond Age (A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer). Now, Amazon sells many different books, and they could have zoomed in on a page from any one of them, many of which are better books, better known, or better sellers. But they chose Stephenson's, quite possibly because they are trying to associate the Kindle with the Primer from the story.
I was on a panel with Peter at a conference a few weeks ago. He still looks just like he did on the box covers in the 80s. Our talk was on The Future of Software and Technology or Something Like That, and of the 8 people on the panel, I found Peter's remarks to be the most eccentric and Sci Fi. He was talking about head's up displays in our eyeglasses and things of that nature.
After we all had our say, the moderator asked if anyone of us had anything to add. The mod looked at Peter, at which point Peter, who was sitting with his arms crossed looking either bored or disgusted (I couldn't tell), stated, "Yes, I have something to say. I am out of here. See ya." So he got up and left.
Most of the audience did not come from tech backgrounds, so I don't think even 10% of them had any idea who he was, or how much of a name he had in the olden days.
I certainly didn't like high school, but I don't remember being inflicted by boredom as much as frustration and annoyance. I never really understood why so many people called school "boring" until I started my first ever job teaching last year. I taught Arabic at a popular university in California, mostly to freshman and sophomores. Even in that rarefied atmosphere of over-achievers volunteering for a tough course, the difference between the top students and the bottom students (we were supposed to say they had "less capacity", as though they were hard drives) was vast indeed. So the problem wasn't teaching in and of itself, although that is a hard job and my hat goes off to people who actually make a career of it. No, the trouble for me was trying to teach to a bell curve of ability.
If I left no student behind and pitched to the slower students, then I would have completely alienated the average and gifted ones. If I pitched to the gifted ones, then 80% of the class would have felt left out. If I drove down the middle of the fairway, then both ends of the curve would be, well, bored.
So when I read this SAS guy's comment about how advanced these students are these days, with their MySpace and iPods and cell phones, I don't buy into the connection between their "cyber-lifestyle" and their educational ennui. I think a typical classroom with typical chalk and a typical board can be plenty stimulating in whatever topic, provided it's tuned to the students' ability levels. But if you are going to insist that everyone in the class is equally able to absorb the material just because they all somehow ended up in the same room together, then you are probably going to have a chunk of students tune out because they're too far behind, and a chunk tune out because they're too far ahead. It would not surprise me if those two groups together would add up to about 47%.
I have the same issue with letters getting transposed if I am typing quickly on my Apple BT keyboard. Sometimes just a letter or two, but sometimes a whole word is reversed. I am not clever enough to do that on my own so I'm guessing it's a BT issue.
But I am on my third Mac notebook in just 18 months (PowerBook then MBPro then MBPro again) after the first two had to be replaced following months of hardware failures, and I'd like a little time off from interacting with Apple's support folks on a weekly basis, so I will live with the occasional drow transposed.
You are right. A few weeks ago I had to choose between PayPal, Google Checkout, and Amazon's new checkout system for a new subscription-based language learning service I rolled out.
Most of my users are college students and tend to use gmail, so I really wanted to use GC. And they are not charging any TX fees for the rest of 2007, so that made them even more attractive. But they are "optimized" to sell physical goods, not subscriptions, so my users would be forced to receive weird emails about shipping costs in the same way that I received emails with shipping information when I signed my business up for Google Apps, which of course uses GC. That nobody was tasked to address this over the summer amazes me, since these are the same folks who made it possible for us to browse the planet Mars.
Then I looked into Amazon's new checkout service which is now in Beta. This sounded familiar, so I hunted around and found a press release from July 2003 that began: "We are almost ready to kick off the beta for our payment system." After nearly fifty months of beta testing, I'll admit it looks promising. But I am using Ruby 1.8.6, while they are still on Ruby 1.8.5. In this case, it matters, so I need to wait for them to support the version of Ruby that came out nearly six months ago.
So that left PayPal, whose subscription-based payment system is a well-documented first-class offering versus an afterthought bolted on to a system meant for physical goods. It required no hoop-jumping to get integrated. The only absolutely maddening part about the whole development cycle is that even in the sandbox, you are forced to re-authenticate pretty much anytime you pause to look at your code, look away from the web page, or entertain a non-PayPal thought. You have one login for the sandbox itself, one for the sample buyer account, one for the seller account, and one for your own site most likely. You need to have separate browsers open (not tabs) otherwise you're clobbering one login session with another. A simple cycle of "Let's purchase a subscription and see if it tracked properly for the buyer, the seller, and on my own site" sets off a flurry of honey-slow logins and redirects. By the time the last one is done, the first session has probably timed out on you and you need to go at it again.
The upshot, at least from my perspective, is that all three systems weren't ideal for processing my subscriptions, but PayPal was usable.
Funny this should come up today. I have been without my ADSL here in SF for nearly a week now, and in fact have not even had dial tone for two days. So the $50/month has felt even more expensive than usual. In fact, I just got down from the roof, where I was hanging out with the ATT/PacBell/Yahoo/YouNameIt tech. He told me it was my lucky day--- he was going to replace the dry-rotted wiring with wire that would conduct a signal, thus re-establishing my dial-tone and my DSL. I asked him why it was lucky that he was replacing the wire, when it seemed to be his job to do just that sort of thing. He said that I am responsible for the wire because it's inside wiring. I mentioned that the wire on the roof was coming in from the street and was quite outside, where it either baked in the sun or sat in a puddle when it rained. He assured me that this was considered inside wire, and not the telco's problem. But what a fun week I've had with tech support.
Tech Support: Hi, what's the problem, sir? Me: There seems to be a line issue. I can ping my ADSL router but can't ping outside that. The sync light also indicates a line issue. TS: Yes, sir. I can help you with that. Are you using a Mac or Windows? Me: Um. Mac. TS: Sir, all our Mac representatives are busy. Try calling back tomorrow. Me: WAIT! No! You see, I think the problem is independent of the computer I am using. TS: I am happy to help you, sir. What browser are you using? Me: Um. Firefox. TS: Well sir, as I mentioned, all our Mac representatives are busy. Try calling back tomorrow. Me: Wait...ah...I might actually be using a Windows machine. Computers are hard. Now what? TS: Oh, in that case we need to determine which version of Windows you are running.... Me: Wait, stop. Can you see my router from where you are? TS: {pause} No sir, there is no signal at all on the line. Me: Ok, so can you imagine a situation where my browser or my computer would have any effect on the actual phone line? TS: Sir, I would be happy to help you, but you see, all our Mac representatives are busy.
Driving while celled has yet to attract any major attention
It has too received major attention in the form of legislation in many countries and states. And several vehicle manufacturers have been offering factory-installed hands-free kits for some time now.
Curiosity got the better of me and I clicked on the second link to find out if perhaps I am doing "e-learning 2.0" without even knowing it or getting buzzword credit for it. Early in the article I discovered the word "edublogosphere", which is pretty much my new favorite word ever.
Ironically, I just switched away from Blogger last week because the new templates, although great-looking, are not easily configured for right-to-left (RTL) languages. I'm not a CSS expert but I did give it a try over the weekend and eventually I gave up fighting it and reverted back to the old template which relied on my surrounding each entry and post title with a DIV DIR=RTL.
I searched around to see what other people had done with the new Blogger and to see if I could just use someone else's template, but all of the ones I saw were a mess. Some parts RTL, some not, some of the layout broken. So, I moved to a site with excellent RTL support, but difficult to use because it seems to have been built and tested solely for Internet Explorer, so Firefox1.5 and Safari and Opera on the Mac all choke on various (but different) aspects of the posting process.
If someone has had some success making a clean Blogger template using Arabic/Farsi/Hebrew/etc, please share.
I'm surprised that this book isn't mentioned anywhere in the Wikipedia article's references or bibliography. For anyone with an even passing interest in the parent post's claim that we (the USA that is) put the Shah in power, you'll find the book informative. I wasn't interested when I started the book, but it's well-written and tough to put down.
There's a book called "Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill : A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence", which will cite some studies for you. It's the same author who wrote On Killing, which I mention in this post. That book, too, has some interesting statistics that might surprise you.
I am not advocating legislation as a way of dealing with violent video games, but it certainly makes sense to study the effects of them a bit more so that whatever decisions we do make are based on actual data and not just the deeply felt convictions of some moral busybody.
I never put much faith in the idea that voilent video games help make kids into killers until I read Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's book On Killing, which discusses in a systematic and well-referenced manner exactly what the armed forces have done since the Civil War to increase the firing rate of their infantrymen.
Firing rate? Contrary to what you may think of the typical Civil War battlefield, most soldiers did not fire their weapons. On a big field running with blood, cannons booming and everyone screaming, most soldiers would not fire a single shot. Battles would end with literally thousands upon thousands of loaded muskets on the ground. Fast forward to WWII, where we have the image of brave American soliders firing automatic weapons under terrible conditions. The nonfiring rate among infantrymen was 80-85%. Further, only 1% of airmen accounted for over 40% of all downed enemy aircraft. Most pilots did not shoot anyone down or even try to.
The Army decided to look into this. What they found out is that people generally don't want to kill anybody, and would often rather die themselves, even in battle when they are scared to death, than shoot someone. Not that the soldiers were cowards. On the contrary, the same soldiers that would not fire a shot would repeatedly take terrible risks to rescue a wounded comrad. But the Army wanted them to pull the trigger and hit something, and they figured out how. The only way someone that scared would be able to do anything in that situation is if they had been subject to operant conditioning. They would need to program the soldier's midbrain to fire the weapon, since the forebrain is no longer in use under that much stress. They began to make training as realistic as possible in terms of exposure to violence, and make the thought/action of killing part of a soldier's reflex, so that when the bullets started flying, the American soldier would respond.
It worked. During Korea the nonfiring rate among infantrymen dropped to 45%, and by Vietnam it was an amazing 5-10%, meaning that nearly every infantryman fired his weapon. The American infantryman had become a killer on the battlefield, and only later did the Army realize that fully 98% of soldiers who experience close combat and pull the trigger would be psychiatric casualties. The 2% that weren't mentally crippled are people who, outside the military, would be locked up.
The author makes an excellent study of how this sort of operant conditioning for violence exists outside the military, in movies and video games. Before you knee-jerk and say that violent video games have no impact on the children who play them hours and hours a day, and who then go watch violent movies and television on top of that, you should check out this book. It's hard to dismiss the data out of hand.
And as for religious texts such as the Bible or the Qur'an, the violence preached in them does condition people to behave violently, if these people read the words over and over and internalize them as fundamental truths. This is just what video games might be doing according to this author.
If you go to this page, or Google around, you can find out about their relationship with Cray. That's not the secret part.
From NSA's online museum: "Working with companies, such as Cray Research Inc., NSA has been a leader in computer development throughout its history. Some of the earliest supercomputers were designed and built for the National Security Agency."
Absolutely. I have visited friends a few times in Warren, in NW PA, which is just a few miles from the NY state border. As you head north, some of the roads are essentially dirt and then suddenly you hit smooth flat black asphalt just as you are reading the sign saying Welcome to New York. I think it's the only time where I have actually seen grass be greener on the other side of something.
Imagine the messages from relatives of deposed Nigerian dictators -- only this time they're on voice mail, too.
I'm not saying I would want hundreds of these calls, but I would love to hear at least one of them. I seem to always put a voice to these poorly-worded emails, as I sit wondering how someone could send out tens of millions of copies of a letter without having someone first proofread the text.
I guess if there's money in it, the spammer could hire a good voice to make the call that much more appealing. Would you be so quick to delete the Nigerian vmail if Derek Jacoby were reading it?
The whole idea of browsing web pages in some sort of 3D reminds me of demos of this I saw at Netscape back in 1996. Pages flying in from nowhere when you'd click on a link, and so on. I imagine people want that now just as much as they wanted it back then-- not a whole lot.
But 3D on the web is not completely pointless as some would suggest. I have been poking around X3D and VRML lately because I am trying to figure out, in this post VRML world, what is the easiest way to show off some 3D scatter plot data via a web page in a way that allows the user to navigate around in it (rotate, pan, etc), and see some textual details on each data point when you got within range (brushing, level-of-detail, picking, billboard text). Initially, I figured this would be a no brainer because I'd done similar things in 1996, but it seems like one area of the web where time has stood still, or has even been rolled back. VRML97 is still around, but there are still all kinds of plugin incompatibilities, varying levels of support of the standards, generally clunkyness, and licensing issues.
Is there a much better way to do this sort of thing that I am missing?
About a year ago I was talking with an engineer from Kyocera's cell phone group and I told him, hey, I would love to have just the simplest of simple phones. It's shaped like a little pencil and has no keypad-- you just twist it to dial one of your presets. Little LED status display running up the side. Syncs with the address book. No browser, no IM, no SMS, no Java games, no calendar, no address book, no MP3 player, no photo/movie viewer. And for the love of all that is good in this world, no crappy camera that takes grainy photos that make it look like it's 1867. This device would just receive calls and allow me to easily contact a handful of people. Small, light, fits in any pocket. Does what I want most of the time. 80/20 rule.
"We could build that, but I'm telling you, nobody wants that," he said. Well, I want it.
I'm curious what happens on these phishing sites once someone actually does log in and submits account information. Does the site just link off to the original site, where the user then has to log in again in order to actually change their online bill pay option?
It seems that even if I got duped into believing that some email written in broken English was from my bank, and even if I went ahead and logged in to the phony site, once I got there I'd see that it wasn't really my bank's site. At that point I could change my account information or cancel my credit card or whatever, and the info the phishers had harvested from me wouldn't be of any use to them.
So in order for phishing to work, which I assume it does, it seems like we need 3 things from the end user. 1) Believe the email is authentic 2) Submit account information to phony site 3) Remain oblivious to anything being phishy about this site.
I guess with enough email volume, anything is possible.
Yes. Here's one Syrian who has managed to not have his head chopped off, despite being in the tiny minority of Syrians who say they do not believe in God.
According to a 2004 survey commissioned by the BBC, 15% of those in Israel do not believe in God. According to Yuchtman-Ya'ar (2003), 54% of Israelis identify themselves as "secular." According to Dashefsky et al (2003), 41% of Israelis identify themselves as "not religious." According to Kedem (1995), 31% of Israelis do not believe in God, with an additional 6% choosing "don't know," for a total of 37% being atheist or agnostic. A 2004 survey commissioned by the BBC found that less than 3% of those in Lebanon do not believe in God.
According to Moaddel and Azadarmaki (2003), less than 5% of those in Jordan and Egypt do not believe in God. According to Inglehart et al (2004), less than 1% of those in Jordan and Egypt do not believe in God. According to Barret et al (2001) less than 1% of those in Syria, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen are secular. According to Johnstone (1993), less than 2% of Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, and Kuwait is nonreligious. According to Johnstone (1993), less than 1% of those in Iraq are nonreligious.
So, my point here is that while atheism is less popular in the Middle East, it does exist, even in places like Syria.
Last time I was in Syria, which was Easter of 1995, I did not feel threatened at all because of my lack of religion. People there were a lot like the masses anywhere I've been--- they have homes, they work, they raise kids, they complain about the economy, they gossip. Granted, Syria was probably the creepiest place I had (and have) ever visited, with Assad peering down at me from every corner, and the secret police generally being a nuisance. But that's not anything to do with religion--- that's just a good old fashioned dictatorship.
But what struck me the most about Syria was when the news broke about the Oklahoma City bombing. The initial suspects were of course said to be Islamic militants. At first I panicked, thinking I was somehow behind enemy lines or something. But wherever I would go, groups of men would approach me apologizing for the Muslims who bombed Oklahoma, asking me to see beyond the acts of a few madmen and to consider all the good people of Islam.
I left the country the next day, so I never got to see their faces when they found out the real news.
What is surprising is that someone modded your demonstrably untrue comment up. What would be surprising to me is if you have ever actually been to a predominantly Muslim country, or sat down with a Muslim for a meal.
First, Christians and Jews all believe in Allah, just like Muslims do. Arab Christians actually do not speak American English when they pray. They speak Arabic, and so they say Allah where someone else might say God.
There are over a billion Muslims on this planet, and I would argue that only a mondest fraction of them want to chop your head off. These billion or so people inhabit large populated countries like Indonesia, and Turkey, where non-Muslims can often be spotted with their heads attached to their shoulders. Even repressive regimes like Syria allow folks to worship Jesus. Sometimes you'll even see a Christian found an ideology around Arab Nationalism and hold high positions in government office.
It is beyond arrogant to think that countries and people are unable to change. I imagine my European forefathers, stagnating for centuries in the Middle Ages, would have felt slighted had they heard the educated and cultured and enlighted Muslims of the day talking about how Europeans would always be that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't know that one! Yes, I see the singular is Huriya and is indeed feminine. And it's a more accurate noun than the three masculine ones I referenced, since it refers to an actual virgin of paradise, versus, say, a Slashdotter.
Alf shukr wa shukr!
What is the word you're thinking of?
I know of three words for virgin in Arabic, and they are actually all masculine nouns: bikr, batool, 3thraa'. (Still cannot submit Arabic characters on Slashdot, in 2008.)
On the other hand, the Arabic word for caliph is feminine (i.e., ends in a taa' marbuTa) but refers, of course, to a man.
I wonder if that means the iPod will start supporting Arabic, if there really is such an emerging market in the ME. There were rumors about Arabic language support back in Jan 2006, I believe, but so far nothing.
The iTunes application does support Arabic, but when you sync the music to the iPod, you just see a blank space where the song name would go.
Someone did hack together Hebrew support on the iPod, which tackles the RTL problem, but Arabic needs to be written in cursive, with all the letters connected. It's a solvable rendering problem, but to date, Apple has obviously not felt it to be worth the candle.
I checked out the demo video for the Kindle on Amazon today. About 15 seconds into it, they zoom into the Kindle to show the text on the screen. It's a page from Stephenson's Diamond Age (A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer). Now, Amazon sells many different books, and they could have zoomed in on a page from any one of them, many of which are better books, better known, or better sellers. But they chose Stephenson's, quite possibly because they are trying to associate the Kindle with the Primer from the story.
I was on a panel with Peter at a conference a few weeks ago. He still looks just like he did on the box covers in the 80s. Our talk was on The Future of Software and Technology or Something Like That, and of the 8 people on the panel, I found Peter's remarks to be the most eccentric and Sci Fi. He was talking about head's up displays in our eyeglasses and things of that nature.
After we all had our say, the moderator asked if anyone of us had anything to add. The mod looked at Peter, at which point Peter, who was sitting with his arms crossed looking either bored or disgusted (I couldn't tell), stated, "Yes, I have something to say. I am out of here. See ya." So he got up and left.
Most of the audience did not come from tech backgrounds, so I don't think even 10% of them had any idea who he was, or how much of a name he had in the olden days.
I certainly didn't like high school, but I don't remember being inflicted by boredom as much as frustration and annoyance. I never really understood why so many people called school "boring" until I started my first ever job teaching last year. I taught Arabic at a popular university in California, mostly to freshman and sophomores. Even in that rarefied atmosphere of over-achievers volunteering for a tough course, the difference between the top students and the bottom students (we were supposed to say they had "less capacity", as though they were hard drives) was vast indeed. So the problem wasn't teaching in and of itself, although that is a hard job and my hat goes off to people who actually make a career of it. No, the trouble for me was trying to teach to a bell curve of ability.
If I left no student behind and pitched to the slower students, then I would have completely alienated the average and gifted ones. If I pitched to the gifted ones, then 80% of the class would have felt left out. If I drove down the middle of the fairway, then both ends of the curve would be, well, bored.
So when I read this SAS guy's comment about how advanced these students are these days, with their MySpace and iPods and cell phones, I don't buy into the connection between their "cyber-lifestyle" and their educational ennui. I think a typical classroom with typical chalk and a typical board can be plenty stimulating in whatever topic, provided it's tuned to the students' ability levels. But if you are going to insist that everyone in the class is equally able to absorb the material just because they all somehow ended up in the same room together, then you are probably going to have a chunk of students tune out because they're too far behind, and a chunk tune out because they're too far ahead. It would not surprise me if those two groups together would add up to about 47%.
I have the same issue with letters getting transposed if I am typing quickly on my Apple BT keyboard. Sometimes just a letter or two, but sometimes a whole word is reversed. I am not clever enough to do that on my own so I'm guessing it's a BT issue.
But I am on my third Mac notebook in just 18 months (PowerBook then MBPro then MBPro again) after the first two had to be replaced following months of hardware failures, and I'd like a little time off from interacting with Apple's support folks on a weekly basis, so I will live with the occasional drow transposed.
You are right. A few weeks ago I had to choose between PayPal, Google Checkout, and Amazon's new checkout system for a new subscription-based language learning service I rolled out.
Most of my users are college students and tend to use gmail, so I really wanted to use GC. And they are not charging any TX fees for the rest of 2007, so that made them even more attractive. But they are "optimized" to sell physical goods, not subscriptions, so my users would be forced to receive weird emails about shipping costs in the same way that I received emails with shipping information when I signed my business up for Google Apps, which of course uses GC. That nobody was tasked to address this over the summer amazes me, since these are the same folks who made it possible for us to browse the planet Mars.
Then I looked into Amazon's new checkout service which is now in Beta. This sounded familiar, so I hunted around and found a press release from July 2003 that began: "We are almost ready to kick off the beta for our payment system." After nearly fifty months of beta testing, I'll admit it looks promising. But I am using Ruby 1.8.6, while they are still on Ruby 1.8.5. In this case, it matters, so I need to wait for them to support the version of Ruby that came out nearly six months ago.
So that left PayPal, whose subscription-based payment system is a well-documented first-class offering versus an afterthought bolted on to a system meant for physical goods. It required no hoop-jumping to get integrated. The only absolutely maddening part about the whole development cycle is that even in the sandbox, you are forced to re-authenticate pretty much anytime you pause to look at your code, look away from the web page, or entertain a non-PayPal thought. You have one login for the sandbox itself, one for the sample buyer account, one for the seller account, and one for your own site most likely. You need to have separate browsers open (not tabs) otherwise you're clobbering one login session with another. A simple cycle of "Let's purchase a subscription and see if it tracked properly for the buyer, the seller, and on my own site" sets off a flurry of honey-slow logins and redirects. By the time the last one is done, the first session has probably timed out on you and you need to go at it again.
The upshot, at least from my perspective, is that all three systems weren't ideal for processing my subscriptions, but PayPal was usable.
Links didn't work for me. Here is a video that might be the same one. And more vids and PDFs from his site.
Funny this should come up today. I have been without my ADSL here in SF for nearly a week now, and in fact have not even had dial tone for two days. So the $50/month has felt even more expensive than usual. In fact, I just got down from the roof, where I was hanging out with the ATT/PacBell/Yahoo/YouNameIt tech. He told me it was my lucky day--- he was going to replace the dry-rotted wiring with wire that would conduct a signal, thus re-establishing my dial-tone and my DSL. I asked him why it was lucky that he was replacing the wire, when it seemed to be his job to do just that sort of thing. He said that I am responsible for the wire because it's inside wiring. I mentioned that the wire on the roof was coming in from the street and was quite outside, where it either baked in the sun or sat in a puddle when it rained. He assured me that this was considered inside wire, and not the telco's problem. But what a fun week I've had with tech support.
Tech Support: Hi, what's the problem, sir?
Me: There seems to be a line issue. I can ping my ADSL router but can't ping outside that. The sync light also indicates a line issue.
TS: Yes, sir. I can help you with that. Are you using a Mac or Windows?
Me: Um. Mac.
TS: Sir, all our Mac representatives are busy. Try calling back tomorrow.
Me: WAIT! No! You see, I think the problem is independent of the computer I am using.
TS: I am happy to help you, sir. What browser are you using?
Me: Um. Firefox.
TS: Well sir, as I mentioned, all our Mac representatives are busy. Try calling back tomorrow.
Me: Wait...ah...I might actually be using a Windows machine. Computers are hard. Now what?
TS: Oh, in that case we need to determine which version of Windows you are running....
Me: Wait, stop. Can you see my router from where you are?
TS: {pause} No sir, there is no signal at all on the line.
Me: Ok, so can you imagine a situation where my browser or my computer would have any effect on the actual phone line?
TS: Sir, I would be happy to help you, but you see, all our Mac representatives are busy.
and so on...
Google, please hurry!
It has too received major attention in the form of legislation in many countries and states. And several vehicle manufacturers have been offering factory-installed hands-free kits for some time now.
Curiosity got the better of me and I clicked on the second link to find out if perhaps I am doing "e-learning 2.0" without even knowing it or getting buzzword credit for it. Early in the article I discovered the word "edublogosphere", which is pretty much my new favorite word ever.
Ironically, I just switched away from Blogger last week because the new templates, although great-looking, are not easily configured for right-to-left (RTL) languages. I'm not a CSS expert but I did give it a try over the weekend and eventually I gave up fighting it and reverted back to the old template which relied on my surrounding each entry and post title with a DIV DIR=RTL.
I searched around to see what other people had done with the new Blogger and to see if I could just use someone else's template, but all of the ones I saw were a mess. Some parts RTL, some not, some of the layout broken. So, I moved to a site with excellent RTL support, but difficult to use because it seems to have been built and tested solely for Internet Explorer, so Firefox1.5 and Safari and Opera on the Mac all choke on various (but different) aspects of the posting process.
If someone has had some success making a clean Blogger template using Arabic/Farsi/Hebrew/etc, please share.
I'm surprised that this book isn't mentioned anywhere in the Wikipedia article's references or bibliography. For anyone with an even passing interest in the parent post's claim that we (the USA that is) put the Shah in power, you'll find the book informative. I wasn't interested when I started the book, but it's well-written and tough to put down.
There's a book called "Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill : A Call to Action Against TV, Movie and Video Game Violence", which will cite some studies for you. It's the same author who wrote On Killing, which I mention in this post. That book, too, has some interesting statistics that might surprise you.
I am not advocating legislation as a way of dealing with violent video games, but it certainly makes sense to study the effects of them a bit more so that whatever decisions we do make are based on actual data and not just the deeply felt convictions of some moral busybody.
I never put much faith in the idea that voilent video games help make kids into killers until I read Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's book On Killing, which discusses in a systematic and well-referenced manner exactly what the armed forces have done since the Civil War to increase the firing rate of their infantrymen.
Firing rate? Contrary to what you may think of the typical Civil War battlefield, most soldiers did not fire their weapons. On a big field running with blood, cannons booming and everyone screaming, most soldiers would not fire a single shot. Battles would end with literally thousands upon thousands of loaded muskets on the ground. Fast forward to WWII, where we have the image of brave American soliders firing automatic weapons under terrible conditions. The nonfiring rate among infantrymen was 80-85%. Further, only 1% of airmen accounted for over 40% of all downed enemy aircraft. Most pilots did not shoot anyone down or even try to.
The Army decided to look into this. What they found out is that people generally don't want to kill anybody, and would often rather die themselves, even in battle when they are scared to death, than shoot someone. Not that the soldiers were cowards. On the contrary, the same soldiers that would not fire a shot would repeatedly take terrible risks to rescue a wounded comrad. But the Army wanted them to pull the trigger and hit something, and they figured out how. The only way someone that scared would be able to do anything in that situation is if they had been subject to operant conditioning. They would need to program the soldier's midbrain to fire the weapon, since the forebrain is no longer in use under that much stress. They began to make training as realistic as possible in terms of exposure to violence, and make the thought/action of killing part of a soldier's reflex, so that when the bullets started flying, the American soldier would respond.
It worked. During Korea the nonfiring rate among infantrymen dropped to 45%, and by Vietnam it was an amazing 5-10%, meaning that nearly every infantryman fired his weapon. The American infantryman had become a killer on the battlefield, and only later did the Army realize that fully 98% of soldiers who experience close combat and pull the trigger would be psychiatric casualties. The 2% that weren't mentally crippled are people who, outside the military, would be locked up.
The author makes an excellent study of how this sort of operant conditioning for violence exists outside the military, in movies and video games. Before you knee-jerk and say that violent video games have no impact on the children who play them hours and hours a day, and who then go watch violent movies and television on top of that, you should check out this book. It's hard to dismiss the data out of hand.
And as for religious texts such as the Bible or the Qur'an, the violence preached in them does condition people to behave violently, if these people read the words over and over and internalize them as fundamental truths. This is just what video games might be doing according to this author.
If you go to this page, or Google around, you can find out about their relationship with Cray. That's not the secret part.
From NSA's online museum: "Working with companies, such as Cray Research Inc., NSA has been a leader in computer development throughout its history. Some of the earliest supercomputers were designed and built for the National Security Agency."
Absolutely. I have visited friends a few times in Warren, in NW PA, which is just a few miles from the NY state border. As you head north, some of the roads are essentially dirt and then suddenly you hit smooth flat black asphalt just as you are reading the sign saying Welcome to New York. I think it's the only time where I have actually seen grass be greener on the other side of something.
I right-clicked on the word "Slashdotted" and thought, yep, that's about right.
Even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day.
Imagine the messages from relatives of deposed Nigerian dictators -- only this time they're on voice mail, too.
I'm not saying I would want hundreds of these calls, but I would love to hear at least one of them. I seem to always put a voice to these poorly-worded emails, as I sit wondering how someone could send out tens of millions of copies of a letter without having someone first proofread the text.
I guess if there's money in it, the spammer could hire a good voice to make the call that much more appealing. Would you be so quick to delete the Nigerian vmail if Derek Jacoby were reading it?
The whole idea of browsing web pages in some sort of 3D reminds me of demos of this I saw at Netscape back in 1996. Pages flying in from nowhere when you'd click on a link, and so on. I imagine people want that now just as much as they wanted it back then-- not a whole lot.
But 3D on the web is not completely pointless as some would suggest. I have been poking around X3D and VRML lately because I am trying to figure out, in this post VRML world, what is the easiest way to show off some 3D scatter plot data via a web page in a way that allows the user to navigate around in it (rotate, pan, etc), and see some textual details on each data point when you got within range (brushing, level-of-detail, picking, billboard text). Initially, I figured this would be a no brainer because I'd done similar things in 1996, but it seems like one area of the web where time has stood still, or has even been rolled back. VRML97 is still around, but there are still all kinds of plugin incompatibilities, varying levels of support of the standards, generally clunkyness, and licensing issues.
Is there a much better way to do this sort of thing that I am missing?
About a year ago I was talking with an engineer from Kyocera's cell phone group and I told him, hey, I would love to have just the simplest of simple phones. It's shaped like a little pencil and has no keypad-- you just twist it to dial one of your presets. Little LED status display running up the side. Syncs with the address book. No browser, no IM, no SMS, no Java games, no calendar, no address book, no MP3 player, no photo/movie viewer. And for the love of all that is good in this world, no crappy camera that takes grainy photos that make it look like it's 1867. This device would just receive calls and allow me to easily contact a handful of people. Small, light, fits in any pocket. Does what I want most of the time. 80/20 rule.
"We could build that, but I'm telling you, nobody wants that," he said. Well, I want it.
Would you want it?
I'm curious what happens on these phishing sites once someone actually does log in and submits account information. Does the site just link off to the original site, where the user then has to log in again in order to actually change their online bill pay option?
It seems that even if I got duped into believing that some email written in broken English was from my bank, and even if I went ahead and logged in to the phony site, once I got there I'd see that it wasn't really my bank's site. At that point I could change my account information or cancel my credit card or whatever, and the info the phishers had harvested from me wouldn't be of any use to them.
So in order for phishing to work, which I assume it does, it seems like we need 3 things from the end user.
1) Believe the email is authentic
2) Submit account information to phony site
3) Remain oblivious to anything being phishy about this site.
I guess with enough email volume, anything is possible.
Yes.
Here's one Syrian who has managed to not have his head chopped off, despite being in the tiny minority of Syrians who say they do not believe in God.
Here are some numbers on atheism in the Middle East:
According to a 2004 survey commissioned by the BBC, 15% of those in Israel do not believe in God. According to Yuchtman-Ya'ar (2003), 54% of Israelis identify themselves as "secular." According to Dashefsky et al (2003), 41% of Israelis identify themselves as "not religious." According to Kedem (1995), 31% of Israelis do not believe in God, with an additional 6% choosing "don't know," for a total of 37% being atheist or agnostic.
A 2004 survey commissioned by the BBC found that less than 3% of those in Lebanon do not believe in God.
According to Moaddel and Azadarmaki (2003), less than 5% of those in Jordan and Egypt do not believe in God. According to Inglehart et al (2004), less than 1% of those in Jordan and Egypt do not believe in God.
According to Barret et al (2001) less than 1% of those in Syria, Oman, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen are secular. According to Johnstone (1993), less than 2% of Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Yemen, and Kuwait is nonreligious. According to Johnstone (1993), less than 1% of those in Iraq are nonreligious.
So, my point here is that while atheism is less popular in the Middle East, it does exist, even in places like Syria.
Last time I was in Syria, which was Easter of 1995, I did not feel threatened at all because of my lack of religion. People there were a lot like the masses anywhere I've been--- they have homes, they work, they raise kids, they complain about the economy, they gossip. Granted, Syria was probably the creepiest place I had (and have) ever visited, with Assad peering down at me from every corner, and the secret police generally being a nuisance. But that's not anything to do with religion--- that's just a good old fashioned dictatorship.
But what struck me the most about Syria was when the news broke about the Oklahoma City bombing. The initial suspects were of course said to be Islamic militants. At first I panicked, thinking I was somehow behind enemy lines or something. But wherever I would go, groups of men would approach me apologizing for the Muslims who bombed Oklahoma, asking me to see beyond the acts of a few madmen and to consider all the good people of Islam.
I left the country the next day, so I never got to see their faces when they found out the real news.
What is surprising is that someone modded your demonstrably untrue comment up. What would be surprising to me is if you have ever actually been to a predominantly Muslim country, or sat down with a Muslim for a meal.
First, Christians and Jews all believe in Allah, just like Muslims do. Arab Christians actually do not speak American English when they pray. They speak Arabic, and so they say Allah where someone else might say God.
There are over a billion Muslims on this planet, and I would argue that only a mondest fraction of them want to chop your head off. These billion or so people inhabit large populated countries like Indonesia, and Turkey, where non-Muslims can often be spotted with their heads attached to their shoulders. Even repressive regimes like Syria allow folks to worship Jesus. Sometimes you'll even see a Christian found an ideology around Arab Nationalism and hold high positions in government office.
It is beyond arrogant to think that countries and people are unable to change. I imagine my European forefathers, stagnating for centuries in the Middle Ages, would have felt slighted had they heard the educated and cultured and enlighted Muslims of the day talking about how Europeans would always be that way.