I wish some Iranians were here to speak for themselves.
Iranians are working hard for their freedom. They fought a very costly war against Iraq, and before that, the Shah. There is a reformist party in Iran. Iran has a sort of democracy in place, although different than ours. The people do have the means to choose their ayatollahs and representatives and president.
Islam doesn't NEED instructions on how to act civilized.
Colombia is 95% Catholic, yet they have a massive, massive drug problem. And they have terrorism too. Should I blame Christianity? How come Cocaine comes from the Catholic countries anyway? You won't see Iran manufacturing it anytime soon.
The believers of Islam don't rape 72 virgins in heaven either. The virgins are only a minor perk of Paradise anyway.
Fatwas aren't issued to anyone who questions Islam, but the Ayatollah of Iran said Salman Rushdie should be killed for purposely insulting the religion. That was his view, and other countries didn't second him.
Female genital mutilation is not an Islamic thing. It's an African thing. African Pagans still do it, and so do some African and Egyptian Christians.
Chavez doesn't respect rights? What about what his attempted coup replacement, Pedro Carmona, he dissolved the government and voided the Constitution. Isn't that worse than whatever Chavez could have done?
Venezuela isn't composed of states, so your comparison of Venezuela's elections to the US' falls flat. Venezuela's elections were monitored by international observers, and I didn't hear them cry foul when it was over.
You're looking at something bigger than an ambulance then, something RV sized. Ambulances have a ton of stuff, shelves and shelves of items but they lack so much more that a real ER has. Some of the major Emergency departments have mobile field hospitals , like in cities, but its only for mass casualty incidents.
Even so, its not that useful. 90% of my EMT calls are minor things, we don't even give them oxygen or put the sirens on for many of them. A roaming ER doesn't do much good if its only for a kid with a fever, better for us to bring the patient to them.
Have there been any threats on tankers? Have there been any attempted attacks? Isn't a bigger problem that Oregon's (or was it Washington's) coastline is only guarded by one state trooper part-time?
I'm sure this will help catch drug dealers, but I don't see terrorists trying this.
There are religions and philosophies that rely on empiricism and human reasoning. The Tao tells its followers how to go about treating one another, and how to seek wisdom, not what clear-cut right and wrong is.
While Jerry Falwell may see dinosaur fossils as God putting them there to "test my faith," Muslims see no contradiction between the current scientific evidence for evolution and the Qur'an. The Qur'an quotes God as saying "You shall not accept any information, unless you verify it for yourself. I have given you the hearing, the eyesight, and the brain, and you are responsible for using them." (The Quran, 17:36) This is just one example.
Not every religion thinks in terms of absolute good and evil. The Pope didn't declare Judaism or Islam evil, and Islam considers Christianity and Judaism to be deviations, but still contain some truths in each. Buddhists or Taoists aren't out to abolish other religions or philosophies.
Your arguement against classifying good and evil falls into a bigger arguement. Can good and evil be absolute and can we classify them? Socrates was working on this for a long time. Muslims rank everything on a scale from good deeds to bad, but none of them claim to have the perfected formula, only God knows. I forget which philosopher it was who decided that absolute right and wrong did exist, but humans would never be able to nail it. I've seen many followers of different religions who agree with that.
You're generalizing religion, I think you only mean Christianity. Not all religions say faith conflicts with reason, you know. If you find that there's a mismatch I think that's a divine sign that you should cross that religion out as it fails the reality test.
I don't think abolishing religion is the way to go. Religion seems to be a simple case of hit or miss. If you apply religion wrong, then it leads to problems. Some religions are quite specific, find one with specifics that match what you believe in. Doing away with religion will only make other problems.
Apple was the first manufacturer to have built-in 802.11 wireless (iBooks, Fall 1999). Everyone else had external antennas. It took Dell over a year to have built-in wireless, and by that time, all of Apple's desktops and portables had built-in wireless.
I've watched my family try to use two-button mice. Often, they would click the wrong mouse button, and this long confusing contextual menu would pop up. Clicking the right mouse button doesn't always dismiss it, instead, the menu would move, and the person would start wiggling the mouse, trying to make the menu disappear. If it gets too confusing, people will give up in frustration. I personally would explore them, but for many people, it's a frustration. A lot of people give up quickly, and if I'm not around to help, they shelve the PC and go about simpler ways to do their activities. Watch how some inexperienced senior citizens try using Windows sometime.
Apple only bundles one-button mice for the same reason they didn't bundle a compiler or X11 with their Macs. They didn't want developers to be lazy and make the consumer go though a more difficult experience. I can see OSS developers forcing the consumers to have to compile apps on their own, and my mother would not know how to do that on her iBook. X11's interface is lousy compared to Mac UI guidelines. Plenty of computer novices have to learn which mouse button does what, and they find it difficult. I know many people over 40 who about half the time hit the wrong mouse button.
Declaring a war against terrorism is like declaring a war against ambushes.
Or my favorite, from Get Your War On, "This war on terror is going to rock! Do you remember how we had a war on drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
"Impaired" also includes those who can still see, but poorly. Legally blind people can't see well enough to drive, but can make out some basic shapes and light and dark. I suppose the zoom feature and inverted-black-and-white would make the Under Mouse feature useful.
I was even able to post to slashdot with it, it would speak the text I was typing in, and recite the names of the buttons I was mousing over, ie. "Submit."
I beta tested some of Mac OS X's spoken user interface. The current version in 10.3 Panther is excellent, built right into the OS. It reads the text under the mouse, dialog boxes, has a variety of high-quality voices, and comes with basic speech recognition for launching apps and running scripts. The last feature has been there since 7.5, Mac users for years have been (frustrated with) using the "tell me a joke" voice script. Tiger looks like it will have even more, but Panther has a lot already.
I like OS X since it also has a bunch of other features for the handicapped, like zoom, contrast and grayscale adjustments. If you're not completely blind, this is quite useful. Check out the Universal Access preferences pane to see the hearing and keyboard and mouse stuff too.
mp3 player for the visually impaired? Hmmm, maybe a laptop running iTunes and the spoken interface enabled. I set it up to read any highlighted text when I hit F8. The only minor problem is that it reads the whole line in the playlist, the name, time, artist, album, genre, etc. That would make quick browsing kind of hard.
Did Mr. Rogers get death threats? Did Canada ever come under threat of terrorism or war? How about Switzerland?
Inviting your neighbor over for dinner goes further to making peaceful relations than building a fence and screaming at him to stay on his side or you'll call the cops.
Go tell an Iraqi that. Try telling Riverbend and she'll burst out laughing. Iraq wasn't the slum you picture it as. Pre-Iran-Iraq war, Iraq was a pretty well-off country, with education and good healthcare. The war, the First Persian Gulf war, the years of sanctions, pushed Iraq into a nasty decline, but there was still plenty of electricity and oil. Now, for the first time ever in Iraq, there is an Oil shortage and a gas crisis within Iraq.
Iraq had water and electricity fine before the US invasion. Saddam Hussein's government didn't let schools and hospitals fall apart. The schools were running fine, albeit under Ba'ath rulership, and the hospitals crumbled under UN and US sanctions, regardless of what the Iraqi government tried to do. The hospitals would never get their medication until Saddam Hussein was overthrown, that was the whole point of the sanctions, to encourage that to happen.
Your last sentence is wrong, and sorta chilling if you think about history of the last 100 years. Italian fascists claimed that reason for invading Libya, and France had that attitude when they ruled Algeria, and the UK had that in mind when they controlled Iraq. I could go on with a list of others.
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Ah, Iranians don't behead people. Maybe you're thinking of fighters in Iraq?
I miss Safeweb and its open source triangle boy app. The site is completely gone now, but it was exactly like that.
I wish some Iranians were here to speak for themselves.
Iranians are working hard for their freedom. They fought a very costly war against Iraq, and before that, the Shah. There is a reformist party in Iran. Iran has a sort of democracy in place, although different than ours. The people do have the means to choose their ayatollahs and representatives and president.
Islam doesn't NEED instructions on how to act civilized.
Colombia is 95% Catholic, yet they have a massive, massive drug problem. And they have terrorism too. Should I blame Christianity? How come Cocaine comes from the Catholic countries anyway? You won't see Iran manufacturing it anytime soon.
The believers of Islam don't rape 72 virgins in heaven either. The virgins are only a minor perk of Paradise anyway.
Fatwas aren't issued to anyone who questions Islam, but the Ayatollah of Iran said Salman Rushdie should be killed for purposely insulting the religion. That was his view, and other countries didn't second him.
Female genital mutilation is not an Islamic thing. It's an African thing. African Pagans still do it, and so do some African and Egyptian Christians.
You remember people dancing in the street? Iran and many other Muslim countries held candlelight vigils for the 9/11 victims. There was TONS of condemnations of terrorism from all over the globe and Islamic groups issue condemnations very often.
So turn on multiple users with fast user switching. There, problem solved.
Chavez doesn't respect rights? What about what his attempted coup replacement, Pedro Carmona, he dissolved the government and voided the Constitution. Isn't that worse than whatever Chavez could have done?
Venezuela isn't composed of states, so your comparison of Venezuela's elections to the US' falls flat. Venezuela's elections were monitored by international observers, and I didn't hear them cry foul when it was over.
You're looking at something bigger than an ambulance then, something RV sized. Ambulances have a ton of stuff, shelves and shelves of items but they lack so much more that a real ER has. Some of the major Emergency departments have mobile field hospitals , like in cities, but its only for mass casualty incidents.
Even so, its not that useful. 90% of my EMT calls are minor things, we don't even give them oxygen or put the sirens on for many of them. A roaming ER doesn't do much good if its only for a kid with a fever, better for us to bring the patient to them.
Have there been any threats on tankers? Have there been any attempted attacks? Isn't a bigger problem that Oregon's (or was it Washington's) coastline is only guarded by one state trooper part-time?
I'm sure this will help catch drug dealers, but I don't see terrorists trying this.
There are religions and philosophies that rely on empiricism and human reasoning. The Tao tells its followers how to go about treating one another, and how to seek wisdom, not what clear-cut right and wrong is.
While Jerry Falwell may see dinosaur fossils as God putting them there to "test my faith," Muslims see no contradiction between the current scientific evidence for evolution and the Qur'an. The Qur'an quotes God as saying "You shall not accept any information, unless you verify it for yourself. I have given you the hearing, the eyesight, and the brain, and you are responsible for using them." (The Quran, 17:36) This is just one example.
Not every religion thinks in terms of absolute good and evil. The Pope didn't declare Judaism or Islam evil, and Islam considers Christianity and Judaism to be deviations, but still contain some truths in each. Buddhists or Taoists aren't out to abolish other religions or philosophies.
Your arguement against classifying good and evil falls into a bigger arguement. Can good and evil be absolute and can we classify them? Socrates was working on this for a long time. Muslims rank everything on a scale from good deeds to bad, but none of them claim to have the perfected formula, only God knows. I forget which philosopher it was who decided that absolute right and wrong did exist, but humans would never be able to nail it. I've seen many followers of different religions who agree with that.
You're generalizing religion, I think you only mean Christianity. Not all religions say faith conflicts with reason, you know. If you find that there's a mismatch I think that's a divine sign that you should cross that religion out as it fails the reality test.
I don't think abolishing religion is the way to go. Religion seems to be a simple case of hit or miss. If you apply religion wrong, then it leads to problems. Some religions are quite specific, find one with specifics that match what you believe in. Doing away with religion will only make other problems.
Apple was the first manufacturer to have built-in 802.11 wireless (iBooks, Fall 1999). Everyone else had external antennas. It took Dell over a year to have built-in wireless, and by that time, all of Apple's desktops and portables had built-in wireless.
I've watched my family try to use two-button mice. Often, they would click the wrong mouse button, and this long confusing contextual menu would pop up. Clicking the right mouse button doesn't always dismiss it, instead, the menu would move, and the person would start wiggling the mouse, trying to make the menu disappear. If it gets too confusing, people will give up in frustration. I personally would explore them, but for many people, it's a frustration. A lot of people give up quickly, and if I'm not around to help, they shelve the PC and go about simpler ways to do their activities. Watch how some inexperienced senior citizens try using Windows sometime.
Apple only bundles one-button mice for the same reason they didn't bundle a compiler or X11 with their Macs. They didn't want developers to be lazy and make the consumer go though a more difficult experience. I can see OSS developers forcing the consumers to have to compile apps on their own, and my mother would not know how to do that on her iBook. X11's interface is lousy compared to Mac UI guidelines. Plenty of computer novices have to learn which mouse button does what, and they find it difficult. I know many people over 40 who about half the time hit the wrong mouse button.
Declaring a war against terrorism is like declaring a war against ambushes.
Or my favorite, from Get Your War On, "This war on terror is going to rock! Do you remember how we had a war on drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
"Impaired" also includes those who can still see, but poorly. Legally blind people can't see well enough to drive, but can make out some basic shapes and light and dark. I suppose the zoom feature and inverted-black-and-white would make the Under Mouse feature useful.
So use the iPod remote, it only has like 4 buttons. A lot of the car kits use the same four functions as well.
I was thinking the iPod's headphone remote may be useful then. It has play/pause, previous, next, and volume up+down.
It is, however, useful for nearly-blind people. People can use a Mac without reading glasses with these sort of features.
I was even able to post to slashdot with it, it would speak the text I was typing in, and recite the names of the buttons I was mousing over, ie. "Submit."
I like OS X since it also has a bunch of other features for the handicapped, like zoom, contrast and grayscale adjustments. If you're not completely blind, this is quite useful. Check out the Universal Access preferences pane to see the hearing and keyboard and mouse stuff too.
mp3 player for the visually impaired? Hmmm, maybe a laptop running iTunes and the spoken interface enabled. I set it up to read any highlighted text when I hit F8. The only minor problem is that it reads the whole line in the playlist, the name, time, artist, album, genre, etc. That would make quick browsing kind of hard.
Did Mr. Rogers get death threats?
Did Canada ever come under threat of terrorism or war?
How about Switzerland?
Inviting your neighbor over for dinner goes further to making peaceful relations than building a fence and screaming at him to stay on his side or you'll call the cops.
Go tell an Iraqi that. Try telling Riverbend and she'll burst out laughing. Iraq wasn't the slum you picture it as. Pre-Iran-Iraq war, Iraq was a pretty well-off country, with education and good healthcare. The war, the First Persian Gulf war, the years of sanctions, pushed Iraq into a nasty decline, but there was still plenty of electricity and oil. Now, for the first time ever in Iraq, there is an Oil shortage and a gas crisis within Iraq.
Iraq had water and electricity fine before the US invasion. Saddam Hussein's government didn't let schools and hospitals fall apart. The schools were running fine, albeit under Ba'ath rulership, and the hospitals crumbled under UN and US sanctions, regardless of what the Iraqi government tried to do. The hospitals would never get their medication until Saddam Hussein was overthrown, that was the whole point of the sanctions, to encourage that to happen.
Your last sentence is wrong, and sorta chilling if you think about history of the last 100 years. Italian fascists claimed that reason for invading Libya, and France had that attitude when they ruled Algeria, and the UK had that in mind when they controlled Iraq. I could go on with a list of others.