I guess my problem is, who's an actual Jew-hater, then? With the logic you (well, the AC) are tossing out, I can easily rationalize all anti-Jewish statements to be "only" anti-Israeli because of ignorance. It still doesn't address my initial, core argument that "fuck you jews" is anti-Jewish sentiment, not anti-Israeli - unless he thinks "Israel=all Jews", in which case he's still anti-Jewish!
I don't really care whether you criticize the Israelis or not, but I damn well do care about people using anti-Israeli feelings as a cover for actual anti-Semitism. Burying your head in the ground and telling me "oh, it's not true" with evidence right in front of me is not reassuring. When police are telling you it's not safe to look like a Jew (not Israeli!) in some parts of certain European countries, you have a big f'ing problem with anti-Semitism, not being anti-Israeli.
"They blocked the resolution telling Israel "you went too far in bombing the UN post!", and USA's support for Israel is largely based on guilt about Holocaust."
I'm just curious - do you have any sources backing this assertion up? Where do you live?* I've spoken to many, many folks here, and "guilt over the Holocaust" has never been brought up. Indeed, judging from the latest statistics I saw, many or most Americans don't even know much about it. I think you're wrong, and you're majorly overplaying that "issue". More likely, most Americans support Israel because they're a fellow democracy, and maybe because of the whole evangelical thing.
-Erwos
*I'm guessing not in the US, but maybe I'm wrong - hence I ask.
Sure, but the problem is, if you can't make the distinction between Jews and Israelis, any serious hatred towards Israelis promptly carries over towards Jews. This is part of the problem with the whole "anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic" paradigm - one seems to lead directly to the other in many cases. I refer you to The Journal of Conflict Resolution for more information about this phenomenon.
I never, ever intended to say that Finns were all Jew-haters, and I definitely don't believe that. I am saying that anti-Israeli sentiment in Europe often carries over into anti-Jewish sentiment.
I also don't get your whole "holocaust guilt trip" thing. Who's using the holocaust to rationalize stopping Hezbollah from kidnapping Israeli soldiers and launching artillery strikes against Haifa?
"Furthermore, I really think that the anti-semitist card has been used for far too long already. Hitler did a horrible crime against Jews but Israel shouldn't use that to gain political advantage any more. Israel is not the weak little victim in this conflict."
I don't understand how you can rationalize "fuck you, jews" to be anti-Israel, and not anti-Semitic.
" FYI: I don't care at all what anybody thinks about me. I'm going to be openly anti-Israel from now on. This was the last straw for me. Fuck you jews."
If it's true, that's a nice little bit of anti-Semitism at the end. He may want to be anti-Israel, but he's just exposed himself as a garden-variety anti-Semite, too.
That said, I hope it's not true, and that this is made up. Any independent corroboration?
My wife is in the same position - she's got the excellent Treo 650, yet Google Maps only runs on my (slow and exceedingly small-screened) LG PM-325.
It looks like one possible solution is Mobile GMaps, which has the added advantage of also being able to use the Yahoo and Microsoft mapping services as well. Additionally, and this is very nice, it can use Bluetooth GPS or your phone's internal GPS system (if it has permissions and the right APIs - aka, if you're lucky).
"The first consignment is for 4 mln units, the report said, noting that monthly shipments will start at 200,000 units, rising to 2 mln in October."
Does this mean they're going to ramp up from 200k per month to 2m per month in the space of about two months? That sounds just a bit unbelievable to me.
They may or may not represent the feelings of the Lebanese people in the south - but they are _not_ an official agency of the Lebanese government, and are thus not recognized internationally as being representative of the internationally-recognized Lebanese government.
The reason they may be able to decimate them now is that their foolish, unprovoked declaration of war on Israel may have finally lost them the popular support that every guerilla group needs to survive.
At the risk of igniting a real flame war, life in Beirut is never really business as usual, because the central government there doesn't have real power over their entire country. They've been occupied by the Israelis and the Syrians over the years, and even once the Syrians and Israelis were gone, they couldn't figure out how to get Hezbollah under control. Lebanon is a country I generally sympathize with - they've gotten screwed by a number of parties in the region and outside of it, and once they get their domestic situation under control, they'll probably be a stabilizing influence in the region.
I do agree with your implication towards the poster who somewhat blithely replied that Tel Aviv was doing OK. For one thing, a good bit of northern Israel isn't doing so hot (witness the shelling of Haifa), and it's a bit crass of him to ignore his own countrymen. Second, the folks in Beirut generally don't want this conflict - they were dragged into it by Hezbollah in the south. Maybe once the Israelis decimate Hezbollah, they can take some real control of their country. Well, here's hoping...
Anyways, back on topic: the Middle East does have substantial interests in poultry, since religious Muslims and Jews don't eat pork. This kind of a vaccine is quite helpful in protecting their flocks and themselves - and that's one less thing they all have to worry about in these troubled times.
I'm not surprised. It sounds easy to launch a rocket (hell, we've been doing it since forever, right?), yet in the light of this failure, North Korea's blown ICBM launch, and SpaceX's spectacular failure a while back, perhaps the difficulty of such things needs to be reassessed in the minds of the average Slashdot reader.
Certainly, the ESA and NASA have something to be proud of when they actually manage to get stuff into orbit:).
Am I the only one who doesn't understand what an Internet OS is supposed to be? I mean, you've got to have an OS to connect to the Internet in the first place...
I just want to point out that the guy in question was a military officer. He's a got a different set of rules to follow than civilians. Put the president of the context of "commanding officer", and it's fairly sensible to not allow contempuous talk - bad for discipline!
Besides, let's face it: that's only a tack-on to his real offense, which was refusing to go to Iraq.
Absolutely correct. Indeed, it seems like the recent trend has been to move away from docking stations with real PCI/PCIe slots, and instead have these awful USB docks. That's a real shame, because I think it would appeal to a lot of folks to have a 12" laptop with good CPU, lots of memory, and a very low-power GPU plug into a docking station with a PCIe x16 slot and maybe a couple of PCIe x1 or PCI slots. Your 12" laptop doubles as a full-blown desktop, but doesn't sacrifice on either end - that's a nice selling point.
Be real. Do you really think Red Hat is going to up and leave the country because of a single software patent suit? This is the same Red Hat that established a legal defense fund for just this sort of thing - if anything, I would think they're going to enjoy the opportunity to crush these guys like a bug.
As for the "EU not being that stupid", good luck with that - they've proven time and time again that the US has no monopoly on idiocy.
Yeah, just like Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake, and Novell have all killed Red Hat, right? I've been hearing for years about Red Hat's impending demise at the hands of new distro X, and so far, so good - for Red Hat.
"One is that it is the US meddling in other nations purely internal affairs."
Internal affairs? International trade is not an internal affair, by definition. When you're violating the copyright of citizens from other countries, it has moved out from being "purely internal" to "international".
"You're allowing wholesale violation of our citizens' internationally recognized copyrights" is hardly the worst reason I've ever heard for objecting to membership in trade organizations, too.
"The US has decided to abandon the Hubble telescope and allow it to burn up in the atmosphere, virtually abandon manned space travel, and divert most of the space research budget to militarizing space. Meanwhile the ESA is doing most of the space research and even China is launching manned missions."
You must not be aware of JWST or CEV, both of which are going at a surprisingly rapid clip. Your comments about the shuttle program and Hubble are amazingly misleading - there's lots of internal support at NASA for dropping the shuttles, and moving to CEV, and a similar sentiment for Hubble and JWST. In fact, the administration has been reasonably friendly to NASA in this time of budget cuts - compared to most other agencies, they took far less of a cut in the last budget. How do I know? I was working there until I left for my own personal reasons, none of which had jack to do with the administration.
Or, let me summarize: you have no idea what you're talking about in terms of NASA, and that makes me suspect your other comments are equally misinformed. Way behind? Right.
"The difference is that Canadian universities are much more homogeneous then US schools. From what I hear, most US universities have specialties - some are "small liberal arts schools", some specialize in engineering/technology, some have great sports teams."
I'm not so sure I agree. Private schools in the US are the ones who tend to end up with those distinctions - state (public) schools are generally more like what you describe Canadian schools as - for instance, UMD at College Park (my alma mater) has a few really excellent programs, but does pretty well at everything else.
You tend to hear more about those specialty schools because, surprise surprise, they're the ones that end up excelling in their chosen specialty, and make the news more often.
"What do you get when you take the very few best students out of a nation of 300 million people and put them in a university where you've bought the very few best professors by offering more money (because of huge tuitions) than anywhere else? A very small number of very good universities. Also, when you say a state university can be top in its field, remember you're talking about the professors, NOT the students. (From my experience, these professors are often foreign and have come to the US because of better pay.)"
First, that "very small number" is an absolutely huge percent of schools in the top 50, and almost entirely dominates the top 20. The Europeans have more slightly schools in the top 400 and 500, but that's somewhat misleading, as I was under the impression that, EU citizen or not, you couldn't just jump to a random university in some other country.
Better programs attract better students. Do you really think the caliber of students at say, MIT, isn't higher than average? As for the professors being foreign, I'd argue that's entirely anecdotal. In the economics department of the school I attended, ranked in the top 20 in the world, most of the talent was American. The same goes for the CS department, which was ranked very highly in the US (unsure of world rankings).
"Also remember to include technical schools when you talk about the community college system in Europe."
One of the things I really like about Europe's system is the large number of technical schools - I think it's something the US could really use. That said, the way I understood it, those technical schools were more for teaching stuff like carpentry, plumbing, and other such skills - correct me if I'm wrong, of course. That's not quite the same as getting a degree in biology from your local CC in the States.
But, if you look at the list of the top 100 schools in the Americas, Canada's aren't even on there 10 times. Of the ones that are, only two are in the top 50 - they're weighted more towards the bottom of the top 100 (it's like saying you're in the bottom half of the richest people in the world, I know!).
I'm not trying to bash Canada's schools - they definitely have great ones, and there's no reason a Canadian citizen would have to leave the country to get a fantastic education (the same goes for European citizens). But in terms of sheer educational strength, the US is way out ahead.
I'm sorry if this sounds like silly triumphalism - I'm only trying to point out that the differences can be surprising.
"There's probably at least 2 hands (10) worth of schools in Canada alone which would rank among the top american universities."
I'll bite. Name them, and try to give some sort of metric as to why they're as good as MIT, CalTech, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and so forth. For bonus points, compare them to the best European schools with those same metrics.
There are a lot of great schools outside the US, but it's my own experience that non-Americans on Slashdot tend to underestimate: 1. Just how amazing the top schools in the US are. 2. The quality of many state schools in specific areas. It's not at all uncommon to find state schools which are ranked in the top 10 in the world in certain programs. Writing off hundreds of state schools as "terrible" is a gross misrepresentation that some/.'ers seem fond of.
There's also the question of quantity and quality - the education you get at a community college may or may not be all that good, but the fact is, it's still an education. The United States has a college/university system which can support _vast_ numbers of students. Leaving that out of the equation is missing the point, to a certain extent, especially when we're talking about start-ups. From what I understand, the community college system in Europe is not nearly as large as in the US (but I'd be happy to be corrected if I'm wrong).
"Plus lets be honest here, WTF does the Xbox have that will work on a small scale?"
Xbox Live Arcade, of course. Imagine that, instead of hauling around UMDs, cartridges, or whatever, that your handheld had a micro drive, or flash storage (flash RAM has been dropping like a stone these days). You'd buy games from Live Arcade, and they'd work on your your Xbox 360 or your Xbox 180 (as I like to call the theoretical handheld). Maybe they could be combined with Live Anywhere and sold on PCs and mobile phones, if it wouldn't cannibalize hardware sales too badly.
So, not only would this handheld be selling Live Arcade on its own, but the 360 would get a boost, too, from the expanded library. Throw in a little cross-platform functionality ala the Gamecube and GBA, and you'd have a superb gaming platform.
If Microsoft was smart, they'd make it a Portable Media Center, too, like what they did with the 360 and Media Center Extender. That'd expand their MCE ecosystem, and give it a better chance of killing the PSP (which, contrary to the parent's assertions, did pretty well in the USA).
Kosher doesn't mean it was blessed. It means the food doesn't contain any forbidden items, such as improperly-slaughtered meat, unkosher meats or fish (eg, pork, shellfish, etc), and so on. I think there's a bit of confusion because kosher slaughtering (shechitah) does require someone with ordination to do it, because of potential complexities and problematic situations - indeed, this is what the bulk of a proper rabbinical ordination covers in material.
Halal is apparently similar, but less strict on the number of "inherently un-Halal" items (for instance, I believe Muslims can eat shellfish). I'm no expert, but I've been told that kosher is a subset of Halal - so Muslims who can't find Halal food can rely on kosher certification in a pinch. I don't think they're supposed to do that as the first option, though, which is understandable (after all, their own authorities should be the one making the call).
You can get foods which are both kosher and Halal - for instance, the My Own Meals brand (they do instant meals and MRE-esque stuff) has a good kosher certification, and at least some sort of Halal certification.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess my problem is, who's an actual Jew-hater, then? With the logic you (well, the AC) are tossing out, I can easily rationalize all anti-Jewish statements to be "only" anti-Israeli because of ignorance. It still doesn't address my initial, core argument that "fuck you jews" is anti-Jewish sentiment, not anti-Israeli - unless he thinks "Israel=all Jews", in which case he's still anti-Jewish!
I don't really care whether you criticize the Israelis or not, but I damn well do care about people using anti-Israeli feelings as a cover for actual anti-Semitism. Burying your head in the ground and telling me "oh, it's not true" with evidence right in front of me is not reassuring. When police are telling you it's not safe to look like a Jew (not Israeli!) in some parts of certain European countries, you have a big f'ing problem with anti-Semitism, not being anti-Israeli.
-Erwos
"They blocked the resolution telling Israel "you went too far in bombing the UN post!", and USA's support for Israel is largely based on guilt about Holocaust."
I'm just curious - do you have any sources backing this assertion up? Where do you live?* I've spoken to many, many folks here, and "guilt over the Holocaust" has never been brought up. Indeed, judging from the latest statistics I saw, many or most Americans don't even know much about it. I think you're wrong, and you're majorly overplaying that "issue". More likely, most Americans support Israel because they're a fellow democracy, and maybe because of the whole evangelical thing.
-Erwos
*I'm guessing not in the US, but maybe I'm wrong - hence I ask.
Sure, but the problem is, if you can't make the distinction between Jews and Israelis, any serious hatred towards Israelis promptly carries over towards Jews. This is part of the problem with the whole "anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic" paradigm - one seems to lead directly to the other in many cases. I refer you to The Journal of Conflict Resolution for more information about this phenomenon.
I never, ever intended to say that Finns were all Jew-haters, and I definitely don't believe that. I am saying that anti-Israeli sentiment in Europe often carries over into anti-Jewish sentiment.
I also don't get your whole "holocaust guilt trip" thing. Who's using the holocaust to rationalize stopping Hezbollah from kidnapping Israeli soldiers and launching artillery strikes against Haifa?
-Erwos
"Furthermore, I really think that the anti-semitist card has been used for far too long already. Hitler did a horrible crime against Jews but Israel shouldn't use that to gain political advantage any more. Israel is not the weak little victim in this conflict."
I don't understand how you can rationalize "fuck you, jews" to be anti-Israel, and not anti-Semitic.
-Erwos
" FYI: I don't care at all what anybody thinks about me. I'm going to be openly anti-Israel from now on. This was the last straw for me. Fuck you jews."
If it's true, that's a nice little bit of anti-Semitism at the end. He may want to be anti-Israel, but he's just exposed himself as a garden-variety anti-Semite, too.
That said, I hope it's not true, and that this is made up. Any independent corroboration?
-Erwos
My wife is in the same position - she's got the excellent Treo 650, yet Google Maps only runs on my (slow and exceedingly small-screened) LG PM-325.
It looks like one possible solution is Mobile GMaps, which has the added advantage of also being able to use the Yahoo and Microsoft mapping services as well. Additionally, and this is very nice, it can use Bluetooth GPS or your phone's internal GPS system (if it has permissions and the right APIs - aka, if you're lucky).
-Erwos
"The first consignment is for 4 mln units, the report said, noting that monthly shipments will start at 200,000 units, rising to 2 mln in October."
Does this mean they're going to ramp up from 200k per month to 2m per month in the space of about two months? That sounds just a bit unbelievable to me.
-Erwos
They may or may not represent the feelings of the Lebanese people in the south - but they are _not_ an official agency of the Lebanese government, and are thus not recognized internationally as being representative of the internationally-recognized Lebanese government.
The reason they may be able to decimate them now is that their foolish, unprovoked declaration of war on Israel may have finally lost them the popular support that every guerilla group needs to survive.
-Erwos
At the risk of igniting a real flame war, life in Beirut is never really business as usual, because the central government there doesn't have real power over their entire country. They've been occupied by the Israelis and the Syrians over the years, and even once the Syrians and Israelis were gone, they couldn't figure out how to get Hezbollah under control. Lebanon is a country I generally sympathize with - they've gotten screwed by a number of parties in the region and outside of it, and once they get their domestic situation under control, they'll probably be a stabilizing influence in the region.
I do agree with your implication towards the poster who somewhat blithely replied that Tel Aviv was doing OK. For one thing, a good bit of northern Israel isn't doing so hot (witness the shelling of Haifa), and it's a bit crass of him to ignore his own countrymen. Second, the folks in Beirut generally don't want this conflict - they were dragged into it by Hezbollah in the south. Maybe once the Israelis decimate Hezbollah, they can take some real control of their country. Well, here's hoping...
Anyways, back on topic: the Middle East does have substantial interests in poultry, since religious Muslims and Jews don't eat pork. This kind of a vaccine is quite helpful in protecting their flocks and themselves - and that's one less thing they all have to worry about in these troubled times.
-Erwos
I'm not surprised. It sounds easy to launch a rocket (hell, we've been doing it since forever, right?), yet in the light of this failure, North Korea's blown ICBM launch, and SpaceX's spectacular failure a while back, perhaps the difficulty of such things needs to be reassessed in the minds of the average Slashdot reader.
:).
Certainly, the ESA and NASA have something to be proud of when they actually manage to get stuff into orbit
-Erwos
Am I the only one who doesn't understand what an Internet OS is supposed to be? I mean, you've got to have an OS to connect to the Internet in the first place...
-Erwos
I just want to point out that the guy in question was a military officer. He's a got a different set of rules to follow than civilians. Put the president of the context of "commanding officer", and it's fairly sensible to not allow contempuous talk - bad for discipline!
Besides, let's face it: that's only a tack-on to his real offense, which was refusing to go to Iraq.
-Erwos
Absolutely correct. Indeed, it seems like the recent trend has been to move away from docking stations with real PCI/PCIe slots, and instead have these awful USB docks. That's a real shame, because I think it would appeal to a lot of folks to have a 12" laptop with good CPU, lots of memory, and a very low-power GPU plug into a docking station with a PCIe x16 slot and maybe a couple of PCIe x1 or PCI slots. Your 12" laptop doubles as a full-blown desktop, but doesn't sacrifice on either end - that's a nice selling point.
-Erwos
Be real. Do you really think Red Hat is going to up and leave the country because of a single software patent suit? This is the same Red Hat that established a legal defense fund for just this sort of thing - if anything, I would think they're going to enjoy the opportunity to crush these guys like a bug.
As for the "EU not being that stupid", good luck with that - they've proven time and time again that the US has no monopoly on idiocy.
-Erwos
Yeah, just like Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake, and Novell have all killed Red Hat, right? I've been hearing for years about Red Hat's impending demise at the hands of new distro X, and so far, so good - for Red Hat.
-Erwos
"One is that it is the US meddling in other nations purely internal affairs."
Internal affairs? International trade is not an internal affair, by definition. When you're violating the copyright of citizens from other countries, it has moved out from being "purely internal" to "international".
"You're allowing wholesale violation of our citizens' internationally recognized copyrights" is hardly the worst reason I've ever heard for objecting to membership in trade organizations, too.
-Erwos
"The US has decided to abandon the Hubble telescope and allow it to burn up in the atmosphere, virtually abandon manned space travel, and divert most of the space research budget to militarizing space. Meanwhile the ESA is doing most of the space research and even China is launching manned missions."
You must not be aware of JWST or CEV, both of which are going at a surprisingly rapid clip. Your comments about the shuttle program and Hubble are amazingly misleading - there's lots of internal support at NASA for dropping the shuttles, and moving to CEV, and a similar sentiment for Hubble and JWST. In fact, the administration has been reasonably friendly to NASA in this time of budget cuts - compared to most other agencies, they took far less of a cut in the last budget. How do I know? I was working there until I left for my own personal reasons, none of which had jack to do with the administration.
Or, let me summarize: you have no idea what you're talking about in terms of NASA, and that makes me suspect your other comments are equally misinformed. Way behind? Right.
-Erwos
"The difference is that Canadian universities are much more homogeneous then US schools. From what I hear, most US universities have specialties - some are "small liberal arts schools", some specialize in engineering/technology, some have great sports teams."
I'm not so sure I agree. Private schools in the US are the ones who tend to end up with those distinctions - state (public) schools are generally more like what you describe Canadian schools as - for instance, UMD at College Park (my alma mater) has a few really excellent programs, but does pretty well at everything else.
You tend to hear more about those specialty schools because, surprise surprise, they're the ones that end up excelling in their chosen specialty, and make the news more often.
-Erwos
"What do you get when you take the very few best students out of a nation of 300 million people and put them in a university where you've bought the very few best professors by offering more money (because of huge tuitions) than anywhere else? A very small number of very good universities. Also, when you say a state university can be top in its field, remember you're talking about the professors, NOT the students. (From my experience, these professors are often foreign and have come to the US because of better pay.)"
First, that "very small number" is an absolutely huge percent of schools in the top 50, and almost entirely dominates the top 20. The Europeans have more slightly schools in the top 400 and 500, but that's somewhat misleading, as I was under the impression that, EU citizen or not, you couldn't just jump to a random university in some other country.
Better programs attract better students. Do you really think the caliber of students at say, MIT, isn't higher than average? As for the professors being foreign, I'd argue that's entirely anecdotal. In the economics department of the school I attended, ranked in the top 20 in the world, most of the talent was American. The same goes for the CS department, which was ranked very highly in the US (unsure of world rankings).
"Also remember to include technical schools when you talk about the community college system in Europe."
One of the things I really like about Europe's system is the large number of technical schools - I think it's something the US could really use. That said, the way I understood it, those technical schools were more for teaching stuff like carpentry, plumbing, and other such skills - correct me if I'm wrong, of course. That's not quite the same as getting a degree in biology from your local CC in the States.
-Erwos
But, if you look at the list of the top 100 schools in the Americas, Canada's aren't even on there 10 times. Of the ones that are, only two are in the top 50 - they're weighted more towards the bottom of the top 100 (it's like saying you're in the bottom half of the richest people in the world, I know!).
I'm not trying to bash Canada's schools - they definitely have great ones, and there's no reason a Canadian citizen would have to leave the country to get a fantastic education (the same goes for European citizens). But in terms of sheer educational strength, the US is way out ahead.
I'm sorry if this sounds like silly triumphalism - I'm only trying to point out that the differences can be surprising.
-Erwos
"There's probably at least 2 hands (10) worth of schools in Canada alone which would rank among the top american universities."
/.'ers seem fond of.
I'll bite. Name them, and try to give some sort of metric as to why they're as good as MIT, CalTech, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and so forth. For bonus points, compare them to the best European schools with those same metrics.
There are a lot of great schools outside the US, but it's my own experience that non-Americans on Slashdot tend to underestimate:
1. Just how amazing the top schools in the US are.
2. The quality of many state schools in specific areas. It's not at all uncommon to find state schools which are ranked in the top 10 in the world in certain programs. Writing off hundreds of state schools as "terrible" is a gross misrepresentation that some
There's also the question of quantity and quality - the education you get at a community college may or may not be all that good, but the fact is, it's still an education. The United States has a college/university system which can support _vast_ numbers of students. Leaving that out of the equation is missing the point, to a certain extent, especially when we're talking about start-ups. From what I understand, the community college system in Europe is not nearly as large as in the US (but I'd be happy to be corrected if I'm wrong).
-Erwos
"Why do we remember pitfall? SMB1? DW1? Because they broke ground, bringing ideas to platforms that did not before exist."
Surely you jest about Dragon Warrior. It was vastly inferior to Apple II RPGs of the day in every way but graphics and sound.
I'd also argue SMB1, fun game that it was, was highly derivative from games like Pitfall and the original Mario Brothers.
-Erwos
"Plus lets be honest here, WTF does the Xbox have that will work on a small scale?"
Xbox Live Arcade, of course. Imagine that, instead of hauling around UMDs, cartridges, or whatever, that your handheld had a micro drive, or flash storage (flash RAM has been dropping like a stone these days). You'd buy games from Live Arcade, and they'd work on your your Xbox 360 or your Xbox 180 (as I like to call the theoretical handheld). Maybe they could be combined with Live Anywhere and sold on PCs and mobile phones, if it wouldn't cannibalize hardware sales too badly.
So, not only would this handheld be selling Live Arcade on its own, but the 360 would get a boost, too, from the expanded library. Throw in a little cross-platform functionality ala the Gamecube and GBA, and you'd have a superb gaming platform.
If Microsoft was smart, they'd make it a Portable Media Center, too, like what they did with the 360 and Media Center Extender. That'd expand their MCE ecosystem, and give it a better chance of killing the PSP (which, contrary to the parent's assertions, did pretty well in the USA).
-Erwos
I can see it now:
"The Nintendo Wii; part of the Touch Generation!"
(And, no, it never gets old - for me, at least.)
-Erwos
Kosher doesn't mean it was blessed. It means the food doesn't contain any forbidden items, such as improperly-slaughtered meat, unkosher meats or fish (eg, pork, shellfish, etc), and so on. I think there's a bit of confusion because kosher slaughtering (shechitah) does require someone with ordination to do it, because of potential complexities and problematic situations - indeed, this is what the bulk of a proper rabbinical ordination covers in material.
Halal is apparently similar, but less strict on the number of "inherently un-Halal" items (for instance, I believe Muslims can eat shellfish). I'm no expert, but I've been told that kosher is a subset of Halal - so Muslims who can't find Halal food can rely on kosher certification in a pinch. I don't think they're supposed to do that as the first option, though, which is understandable (after all, their own authorities should be the one making the call).
You can get foods which are both kosher and Halal - for instance, the My Own Meals brand (they do instant meals and MRE-esque stuff) has a good kosher certification, and at least some sort of Halal certification.