1. Persians are Persians. Turkomen are Turkomen, not Persians. Kurds are Kurds, not Persians (though Kurds are Aryans and speak a dialect of Persian). The other peoples in Iran are NOT Persians. Lurs are Lurs. There are more; I can't think of them all right now. Persians are a small majority in Iran, making up just over 50% of the population.
2. Germans are not Aryans. Hitler simply didn't know what the term Aryan meant. It does not mean "white" or Indo-European. Aryans are a sub category of Indo-Europeans who live, primarily on the Iranian plateau and in India. The English and French (and Germans and Norwegians and Danes and...) are NOT Aryans. They are, however, Indo-Europeans.
And all this stuff is not futile and meaningless in the modern world. Nationalism based on real or percieved ethnicity is still one of the most potent unifying forces for a sovereign state.
It more than English/French in linguistic terms. Farsi and Arabic come from completely different language families. Farsi is Indo-European (like Latin, French, German, Hindi, and English) whereas Arabic is Semitic (like Hebrew).
In terms of nationalism, the English/French analogy works. Persians, in my experience, aren't all that fond of Arabs.
They share a script and some vocabulary, but that's about it.
Iran is democratic. It is, after all, the Islamic Republic of Iran. President Khatami was initially elected through mass voter turnout in 1997 to democratically overthrow the ruling "party" (I can't remember the name of the incumbant). Granted, there are a few limitations. To run for president you have to be a cleric and all candidates have to be approved by the religious authority, but the American republic has similar limitations. Presidents have to be 45 years of age (or something like that) and have to be born in the U.S. (And, for all intents and purposes, have to be affiliated with the duopoly of ruling parties.)
Do a little research before you label a country a "dictatorship".
I think you've got your dates a little off. Iraq was known as the Fertile Crescent more in the era of the Assyrian empire than the Ottoman one!
You're giving Mr. Hussein way too much credit here. He didn't turn Mesopotamia into a desert with 25 years of bad ecological policy; no, that took thousands of years of over-irrigation. Of course it's true that the Tigris-Euphrates valley was once quite green and lush and that it's the source of that old Semitic legend, the Garden of Eden. But this was thousands of years ago, not hundreds.
The deserification of Mesopotamia was the result of thousands of years of intensive agriculture. Artificial irrigation, when done for thousands of years, slowly but surely cakes the once-fertile soil with salt. Salinization of the soil is the primary reason the fertile crescent [very] gradually turned into a desert.
It took longer than 25 years since the installation of Saddam Hussein or the 85-odd years since the end of the Ottoman Empire. The culprit wasn't the B`ath (I don't know what the proper Romanized spelling of this political party is) party's bad agricultural policies, it was the "bad agricultural policies" of:
Sumerians
Babylonians
Assyrians
Chaldeans (or "New Babylonians")
Achaemenid Persians
Seleucid Greeks (Macedonians, really)
Sassanid Persians
Arabs
Mongols
Ottoman Turks
Western Europeans
and, last but not least, "Iraqis"
(Of course, there really is no such thing as an "Iraqi". There's Arab Sunnites, Arab Shi`a, and Kurds. Three different nations, not one. Iraqi nationalism and the Iraqi people are, in my opinion, the creation of the B`ath party, but I'm sure George Bush and Saddam Hussein would disagree.)
Heck, Venezuela is even more of an oil-archy (or, I like this even better: "petroliarchy") than those lazy Persian Gulf monarchies that the Americans love so much: Kuwait and Saudi Arabia among others. The president (or prime minister; I'm not exactly sure what they call them there) is the head hancho of Citgo Oil. That says to me that Venezuela is ruled by Citgo. (just like the U.S. is ruled by Halliburton...he he he)
Oh well, the whole continent used to be ruled by the owners of big coffee plantations through the hacienda system. Coffee oligarchy to Oil oligarchy... I guess it's a natural transition.
Reading the changelog, I was just happy to see they updated the drivers for the Adaptec AHA-2840 VLB SCSI controller and the SMC 91C92 Ethernet chip, which is found on my VESA Local Bus Ethernet cards. Ah, I'm thrilled because I just so happen to be building a file server right now that uses both.
Hey, you can't tell me I'm the only person in here who uses the VESA Local Bus on his servers!!!
The best thing about the Itanium is that not only can you run your x86 binaries really slowly, you can also run all those PA-RISC binaries you have laying around really slowly, too. How helpful!
I'm just being annoying here. No disrespect to any PA-RISC users intended at all. I quite like the PA-RISC architechture, and the workstations built with it are top of the line equipment, at least in my experience.
I keep reading about people talking about the cost of computers and DVD players in order to view Video CDs. I'm pretty darn sure, though, that the Sony Playstation (the first one) can play Video CDs just fine.
And the last time I checked, you could pick these things up used for under $40 some places. How about it? One of these machines could provide a great Video CD and audio CD player for classrooms.
Of course, there are the issues of students bringing copies of the favorite first person shooters to class...
Why on earth does anyone care at all about this? Who the hell wants binaries anyway? Are we not Unix users? Then we should compile our own binaries!
I'll have you know that my Linux system was created entirely from source I compiled myself. That's right, no freaking "distribution". Now, granted, I used a SuSE system from which to compile it, but still.
I'm disgusted, quite frankly, about my MS-DOSish Linux presenty is. RPM is a prime example. Get with the picture. This is Unix! Software is distrubted as and installed from source! That's how it works.
Sorry, I'll step off my soapbox now. I didn't mean to be that bitchy, and, of course, there is a need for distributions. I can't help mention, though, how much it pains me everytime I hear people talking about how "we need to make Linux more user-friendly" and "anything that makes the Linux userbase larger is great". I don't know about you, but I don't want Linux to become Windows! If you want Windows, use Windows! If you want a free Unix, Linux is nice. If companies want a Unix with support, they can afford Solaris. Why can't the Linux community be satisfied to stick to itself? Do we really want to conquer the world, too? Great, the Linus can be the next generation's Bill Gates. Accept Linux for what it is, and like it! Seriously.
I wouldn't be so trusting of the LaserJet 1100. I had one for about a year and a half. One day it got a paper jam. I opened the thing up, took the toner cartridge out, pulled the paper out, put the toner back in and closed it. The thing never worked again.
All it would ever print were solid black pages. I took it to some "printer guy" and he confirmed that the thing was trashed.
For a laser printer, $400 is not overpriced!! I should have known better than to buy a $400 laser printer.
I'm planning on replacing the shoddy 1100 with something along the lines of a LaserJet III or IIID. Something from at least as far back as 1993. That's the only way to find quality; buy old stuff!
You know, I really honestly believe that Slashdot should stop allowing Anonymous Coward posts. Now, granted, all I needed to do was change my threshold, but I keep it at zero because I do like to see the AC posts.
OK, now it's looking like I've contradicted myself, but here's the deal: if we disallowed AC posts, the ones who have anything intelligent to say would just get a username. That's good anyway, right?
Now the question may be: what about the "kewl d00d" that posted the message I'm applying too; do we really want these morons all being official "Slashdotters?" Well, we need some kind of system (perhaps working off e-mail address) that would forever ban you from Slashdot if you ever try to create an account with a username like 1337pImPdAdDyOWNZj00!!! or pHaT_gAmEr_H4X0R as I'm sure our friend just couldn't resist doing.
Anyway, here's the reason I posted these thoughts in the first place. I don't think Slashdot should allow posts from people who regularly say things like:
"My daddy just bought me, uh, I mean, I just got this pimp-daddy-yo new 'puter with and Athlon XP 2666+ and 2GB DDR so I can beat everyone on my online Quake 3 tournaments."
"Oh, I mean, not Quake 3! That's just so last week, I mean, like, GAWD! I only play modern games!!!!!"
"Ha ha! I'm better than you are because my computer's faster than yours is! Ha ha! And I'm also more of a 31337 H4X0R than you are! Ha ha!"
Nah, sorry. I sure don't mean to be inconsiderate to your concern, but the whole essence of USENET is that it is not private, and that the USENET reading public will read what you have posted. Would you have posted something in the first place unless, at the time, you had wanted someone to read it?
Consider your embarrassment an experience to recognize your growth! How about it?
Also, though my opinion holds no more weight than the next man's, I think it's somehow "wrong" to remove your posts from Google's archive as the poster right above me mentioned you could do. If it's true that doing this would actually permanently remove one's postings from the archive, is it one person's right to delete a piece of history?
Anyway, I think what Google has done is extraordinary. Dejanews before them provided a wonderful service, but it's great to see Google bring back the entire archive!
It really saddens me that in this day and age, people so often fail to recognize the fundamental differences from somthing like a "trade school" and "going to college."
It seems, to me, to happen at an alarming rate among folks in the Computer Science field. They ignore the disctinction between education and training. Learning the skills one needs to program (just as one example) does not constitute education. That is training, the acquisition of skills, learning how "to do stuff." Education is completely different; one's goal is not to learn how to do things that will get you paid better on the job. The purpose is the open your mind to even a small part of the vast body of the knowledge acquired by the human race. There is a difference between an uneducated person and an educated person, and the distinction has nothing to do with "marketable skills."
So many folks (and, yes, so many folks in the CS, CE, EE arena) go to college in order to gain these marketable skills. They figure that "people will degrees get paid better," and this is sadly what our business-minded culture accepts. I, personally, am fascinated by Computer Science and that was going to be my undergraduate major, but I changed my major to History in order to avoid finding myself in a job-training program. If that was what I wanted, I would have made my way to the nearest Vo-Tech, but I wanted to be educated in the classical, true sense of the term.
Thank you, and I'm not knocking anyone in technical school... you folks knew what you were looking for:)
Slashdot Mirror
OK... you've got a lot of stuff wrong here.
...) are NOT Aryans. They are, however, Indo-Europeans.
1. Persians are Persians. Turkomen are Turkomen, not Persians. Kurds are Kurds, not Persians (though Kurds are Aryans and speak a dialect of Persian). The other peoples in Iran are NOT Persians. Lurs are Lurs. There are more; I can't think of them all right now. Persians are a small majority in Iran, making up just over 50% of the population.
2. Germans are not Aryans. Hitler simply didn't know what the term Aryan meant. It does not mean "white" or Indo-European. Aryans are a sub category of Indo-Europeans who live, primarily on the Iranian plateau and in India. The English and French (and Germans and Norwegians and Danes and
And all this stuff is not futile and meaningless in the modern world. Nationalism based on real or percieved ethnicity is still one of the most potent unifying forces for a sovereign state.
It more than English/French in linguistic terms. Farsi and Arabic come from completely different language families. Farsi is Indo-European (like Latin, French, German, Hindi, and English) whereas Arabic is Semitic (like Hebrew).
In terms of nationalism, the English/French analogy works. Persians, in my experience, aren't all that fond of Arabs.
They share a script and some vocabulary, but that's about it.
And Arabic is not commonly spoken in Iran at all.
Iran is democratic. It is, after all, the Islamic Republic of Iran. President Khatami was initially elected through mass voter turnout in 1997 to democratically overthrow the ruling "party" (I can't remember the name of the incumbant). Granted, there are a few limitations. To run for president you have to be a cleric and all candidates have to be approved by the religious authority, but the American republic has similar limitations. Presidents have to be 45 years of age (or something like that) and have to be born in the U.S. (And, for all intents and purposes, have to be affiliated with the duopoly of ruling parties.)
Do a little research before you label a country a "dictatorship".
I think you've got your dates a little off. Iraq was known as the Fertile Crescent more in the era of the Assyrian empire than the Ottoman one!
You're giving Mr. Hussein way too much credit here. He didn't turn Mesopotamia into a desert with 25 years of bad ecological policy; no, that took thousands of years of over-irrigation. Of course it's true that the Tigris-Euphrates valley was once quite green and lush and that it's the source of that old Semitic legend, the Garden of Eden. But this was thousands of years ago, not hundreds.
The deserification of Mesopotamia was the result of thousands of years of intensive agriculture. Artificial irrigation, when done for thousands of years, slowly but surely cakes the once-fertile soil with salt. Salinization of the soil is the primary reason the fertile crescent [very] gradually turned into a desert.
It took longer than 25 years since the installation of Saddam Hussein or the 85-odd years since the end of the Ottoman Empire. The culprit wasn't the B`ath (I don't know what the proper Romanized spelling of this political party is) party's bad agricultural policies, it was the "bad agricultural policies" of:
(Of course, there really is no such thing as an "Iraqi". There's Arab Sunnites, Arab Shi`a, and Kurds. Three different nations, not one. Iraqi nationalism and the Iraqi people are, in my opinion, the creation of the B`ath party, but I'm sure George Bush and Saddam Hussein would disagree.)
Heck, Venezuela is even more of an oil-archy (or, I like this even better: "petroliarchy") than those lazy Persian Gulf monarchies that the Americans love so much: Kuwait and Saudi Arabia among others. The president (or prime minister; I'm not exactly sure what they call them there) is the head hancho of Citgo Oil. That says to me that Venezuela is ruled by Citgo. (just like the U.S. is ruled by Halliburton...he he he)
Oh well, the whole continent used to be ruled by the owners of big coffee plantations through the hacienda system. Coffee oligarchy to Oil oligarchy... I guess it's a natural transition.
Reading the changelog, I was just happy to see they updated the drivers for the Adaptec AHA-2840 VLB SCSI controller and the SMC 91C92 Ethernet chip, which is found on my VESA Local Bus Ethernet cards. Ah, I'm thrilled because I just so happen to be building a file server right now that uses both.
Hey, you can't tell me I'm the only person in here who uses the VESA Local Bus on his servers!!!
Ah, don't you love Americans?
The best thing about the Itanium is that not only can you run your x86 binaries really slowly, you can also run all those PA-RISC binaries you have laying around really slowly, too. How helpful!
I'm just being annoying here. No disrespect to any PA-RISC users intended at all. I quite like the PA-RISC architechture, and the workstations built with it are top of the line equipment, at least in my experience.
PA-RISC Powered, Baby! Hell, yeah!
Sorry.
I keep reading about people talking about the cost of computers and DVD players in order to view Video CDs. I'm pretty darn sure, though, that the Sony Playstation (the first one) can play Video CDs just fine.
And the last time I checked, you could pick these things up used for under $40 some places. How about it? One of these machines could provide a great Video CD and audio CD player for classrooms.Of course, there are the issues of students bringing copies of the favorite first person shooters to class...
Why on earth does anyone care at all about this? Who the hell wants binaries anyway? Are we not Unix users? Then we should compile our own binaries!
I'll have you know that my Linux system was created entirely from source I compiled myself. That's right, no freaking "distribution". Now, granted, I used a SuSE system from which to compile it, but still.
I'm disgusted, quite frankly, about my MS-DOSish Linux presenty is. RPM is a prime example. Get with the picture. This is Unix! Software is distrubted as and installed from source! That's how it works.
Sorry, I'll step off my soapbox now. I didn't mean to be that bitchy, and, of course, there is a need for distributions. I can't help mention, though, how much it pains me everytime I hear people talking about how "we need to make Linux more user-friendly" and "anything that makes the Linux userbase larger is great". I don't know about you, but I don't want Linux to become Windows! If you want Windows, use Windows! If you want a free Unix, Linux is nice. If companies want a Unix with support, they can afford Solaris. Why can't the Linux community be satisfied to stick to itself? Do we really want to conquer the world, too? Great, the Linus can be the next generation's Bill Gates. Accept Linux for what it is, and like it! Seriously.
I wouldn't be so trusting of the LaserJet 1100. I had one for about a year and a half. One day it got a paper jam. I opened the thing up, took the toner cartridge out, pulled the paper out, put the toner back in and closed it. The thing never worked again. All it would ever print were solid black pages. I took it to some "printer guy" and he confirmed that the thing was trashed. For a laser printer, $400 is not overpriced!! I should have known better than to buy a $400 laser printer. I'm planning on replacing the shoddy 1100 with something along the lines of a LaserJet III or IIID. Something from at least as far back as 1993. That's the only way to find quality; buy old stuff!
You know, I really honestly believe that Slashdot should stop allowing Anonymous Coward posts. Now, granted, all I needed to do was change my threshold, but I keep it at zero because I do like to see the AC posts.
OK, now it's looking like I've contradicted myself, but here's the deal: if we disallowed AC posts, the ones who have anything intelligent to say would just get a username. That's good anyway, right?
Now the question may be: what about the "kewl d00d" that posted the message I'm applying too; do we really want these morons all being official "Slashdotters?" Well, we need some kind of system (perhaps working off e-mail address) that would forever ban you from Slashdot if you ever try to create an account with a username like 1337pImPdAdDyOWNZj00!!! or pHaT_gAmEr_H4X0R as I'm sure our friend just couldn't resist doing.
Anyway, here's the reason I posted these thoughts in the first place. I don't think Slashdot should allow posts from people who regularly say things like:
Nah, sorry. I sure don't mean to be inconsiderate to your concern, but the whole essence of USENET is that it is not private, and that the USENET reading public will read what you have posted. Would you have posted something in the first place unless, at the time, you had wanted someone to read it?
Consider your embarrassment an experience to recognize your growth! How about it?
Also, though my opinion holds no more weight than the next man's, I think it's somehow "wrong" to remove your posts from Google's archive as the poster right above me mentioned you could do. If it's true that doing this would actually permanently remove one's postings from the archive, is it one person's right to delete a piece of history?
Anyway, I think what Google has done is extraordinary. Dejanews before them provided a wonderful service, but it's great to see Google bring back the entire archive!
Thank you for your time, folks!
It really saddens me that in this day and age, people so often fail to recognize the fundamental differences from somthing like a "trade school" and "going to college."
It seems, to me, to happen at an alarming rate among folks in the Computer Science field. They ignore the disctinction between education and training. Learning the skills one needs to program (just as one example) does not constitute education. That is training, the acquisition of skills, learning how "to do stuff." Education is completely different; one's goal is not to learn how to do things that will get you paid better on the job. The purpose is the open your mind to even a small part of the vast body of the knowledge acquired by the human race. There is a difference between an uneducated person and an educated person, and the distinction has nothing to do with "marketable skills."
So many folks (and, yes, so many folks in the CS, CE, EE arena) go to college in order to gain these marketable skills. They figure that "people will degrees get paid better," and this is sadly what our business-minded culture accepts. I, personally, am fascinated by Computer Science and that was going to be my undergraduate major, but I changed my major to History in order to avoid finding myself in a job-training program. If that was what I wanted, I would have made my way to the nearest Vo-Tech, but I wanted to be educated in the classical, true sense of the term.
Thank you, and I'm not knocking anyone in technical school... you folks knew what you were looking for :)
-Lawrence
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