Yes, some people like to call it a distinct language, but as even the article to which you link indicates, its a form of Arabic not very different from the Arabic of the other countries of the Levant and is usually called "Lebanese Arabic".
Sorry, but no, people from Lebanon do not speak "Lebanese". They speak Arabic, specifically Levantine Arabic. If there were a sufficiently distinct language associated with Lebanon it might indeed be called "Lebanese", but there isn't.
I don't know about this particular area, but Iran's industrial sector is more advanced than you might think. There is an extensive auto industry. Though it manufactures under licenses from foreign companies (the most common vehicle is a variant of the Peugeot 206), modifications have been designed and implemented in Iran. Iran is no banana republic.
According to http://www.indiaevm.org/, the voting machine studied was "provided by an anonymous source". So it may have been stolen, though apparently by someone else. He might be guilty of something, but it would be receiving stolen property, not theft. Or maybe the source had legitimate access to the machine. It is also not clear whether the machine was returned.
I'm not so sure that this is a good idea. It's bad enough with cab drivers on their cell phones all the time. It'll be even worse if they're on their laptops and iPads.
What you say would be true only if potato production were limited to current levels and if there were no surplus. In fact, potato production could be increased to accommodate use for batteries, and in any case th ere is actually a surplus. Total world food production is adequate - the reason that some people starve is poor distribution of the available food, in considerable part due to political reasons. (Starvation in North Korea, for example, is the result of the incompetence of the country's government.)
The news here appears to be the discovery that boiling the potatoes increases their utility for batteries considerably. 4th grade science project potato batteries use raw potatoes, don't they?
If some other service replaces Twitter, there's a good chance that using that service will also be referred to as "tweeting" since the term has become so well established, just as people refer to photocopying as "xeroxing" and to facial tissue as "kleenex". I don't care much for the word "tweet", but then I don't care much for Twitter either - its mostly a huge waste of time and an opportunity for obnoxious egotists to spam out details of their lives that hardly anyone should be interested in. But the word "tweet" is what people are using so its what journalists should use too.
While it's true that money spent on lobbying can have a large impact, Israel is hardly the prime example of this. A far better example is that of Saudi Arabia, a far richer country that has succeeded through lobbying and the cultivation of connections with people like the Bush family in deflecting serious criticism of its awful human rights record and support for Islamic extremism. In the case of Israel there are several additional factors: (a) the very strong moral case for supporting Israel; (b) the fact that Israel is far more representative of American values of freedom, democracy, and transparency than any other state in the Middle East; (c) the significant return that the US gets on its investment in the form of military technology and intelligence; (d) the fact that Israel is a much
more genuine ally than the Arab countries, for whom alliance with the US, when it occurs, is a matter of convenience.
That the US has not been a more vocal critic of Israel's interdiction of the jihad flottila reflects an understanding of what is really going on: the flottila was not bringing critically needed aid to Gaza and the people involved were not neutral humanitarians but jihadists and their dupes.
If you think that the purpose of the flottilla was to bring humanitarian aid, consider the following facts: (a) the blockade does not and never has affected critical supplies such as food and medicine; (b) Israel offered to accept the flottilla's cargo, inspect it for contraband (weapons, explosives, and other supplies of military use to Hamas), and pass it on to Gaza by truck if the flottila would
dock at Ashdod. The entire dispute is about whether the flottilla would be able to dock and unload unsupervised, not whether aid could be given to Gaza; (c) once Israel seized the ships, it unloaded the cargo, inspected it, and moved it by truck to Gaza; (d) the cargo has not been distributed in Gaza because Hamas has refused to permit it. Evidently they don't think that there is such a humanitarian crisis, or they do, but they don't care as much about the people of Gaza as Israel does; (e) the Egyptian government opened its crossing into Gaza shortly after the seizure of the flottilla. If there were an urgent need for aid, we would expect Free Gaza and other organizations to have taken advantage of this opportunity to move supplies into Gaza. Did they? No. The Egyptian Red Cross moved a modest amount of supplies (mostly tents and things like that) into Gaza. That's it. No rush to move those urgently needed supplies via Egypt. (f) Al-Fatah, the mainline Palestinian
organization, the one in actual control of Judea and Samaria and nominal control of the entire Palestinian government, has stated that there is no humanitarian crisis and no urgent need for
supplies.
In short, the whole thing is a fraud, a stunt by jihadists and other rabid anti-Israel forces.
It is mostly a publicity stunt, though at least one of the "humanitarians" has now bragged that one of their goals was to take Israeli soldiers hostage and that they briefly succeeded before
the Israeli forces finally resorted to lethal force and freed the hostage.
Fortunately, the US government, whose grasp of foreign affairs I sometimes wonder about, has
got this one right and is not jumping on the anti-Semitic bandwagon.
And they thought people would like yet another rebate plan, where you don't see the rebate until weeks later?
Even if the rebate is set up automatically and there's nothing that has to be sent in, I'd much rather not pay the extra in the first place and not have to keep track of rebates.
When there is a violation of the gaming laws, like the gambler being under-age, the casino has a rock-solid basis for behaving as if there were no contract because it is black-letter law that a contract that violates the law is unenforceable. It's as if the contract had never been made. So it isn't so much the casino insisting that the gambler abide strictly by the contract - rather, the casino is relying on the fact that legally it has no contractual obligations. In non-legal terms of fairness, I see your point, but there's a sound legal basis for the apparent asymmetry.
No, no, no! For two reasons. First, it's bad for the minority of people in those countries who do not subscribe to the mediaeval theocratic line. For them, the internet is often the major connection to the outside world. Second, even with censorship, and even with skepticism of what unbelievers say, the internet does have an influence in these countries. We should attempt to maximize internet access and support mechanisms for bypassing censorship and preserving anonymity.
Yes, I have drunk coffee in Salt Lake City. Many people don't drink it, and many restaurants don't sell it, but it is neither illegal nor unavailable. You can buy coffee beans in grocery stores and many restaurants do serve coffee. There are at least half a dozen Starbucks in Salt Lake City.
Since when is making a joke about taking drugs something terribly embarrassing that would have an impact on her job as a dispatcher? People make jokes all the time about things they would never do - it doesn't even hint that she actually has a drug problem. This didn't warrant any action against her at all. The real problem that it illustrates is that West Allis has fools in its administration.
I am wondering what the legal basis for the restriction on commercial use might be. US government publications are in the public domain - there is no crown copyright at the federal level in the US. So the only situation in which they can legitimately impose restrictions is when they are reproducing material whose copyright is owned by others.
The monitoring software is a commercial product, isn't it? Anyone know how much it costs? If the cost is non-trivial, it seems likely that someone reasonably high up in the school administration had to approve the purchase and therefore knew what it was for.
How so? In the US, truth is an absolute defense to defamation, so he has no defamation claim. I don't see a privacy-related tort here. I agree that what the Gizmodo people did was rotten, and they may well be criminally liable for receiving stolen property, but I don't see the basis for a tort claim by the guy who lost the device. What is the cause of action that you envision?
First, taking home a school laptop in this situation would be a violation of school rules and possibly a civil matter, but not theft. For it to be a theft, there would have to be a reason to believe that the kid intended to keep it.
Second, the school district's excuse doesn't fit the facts. There's no indication that they didn't know that the kid had the laptop. It was issued to him, and there's no indication that, however they discovered that it wasn't at school, they even bothered to ask him about it. In any case, if they had actually been trying to find a missing laptop, why would they have kept the camera on for two weeks? Did it really take that long to identify the kid? And when he was finally confronted by the school administration, why did they not punish him for improperly taking the laptop home if that was the issue? According to the press accounts, that issue was not raised. Instead, they raised the bogus issue of him popping pills that were actually candy.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the problem of slippery road conditions. Slamming on the brakes when you see a yellow light might work on dry pavement, but for those of us who have ice and snow on the roads a significant part of the year, its a very bad idea. The consequences of the resulting skid are likely going to be worse than those of proceeding through the intersection. Not only are sufficiently long yellow lights wise, but around here some intersections have "stop light coming up" signs a good distance ahead of the intersection to warn drivers to slow down and be prepared to stop.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, the passage you repeated contributed no new information, as I suspected. And now you repeat the information I provided. Weird.
Yes, some people like to call it a distinct language, but as even the article to which you link indicates, its a form of Arabic not very different from the Arabic of the other countries of the Levant and is usually called "Lebanese Arabic".
Sorry, but no, people from Lebanon do not speak "Lebanese". They speak Arabic, specifically Levantine Arabic. If there were a sufficiently distinct language associated with Lebanon it might indeed be called "Lebanese", but there isn't.
Repeating that paragraph doesn't contribute anything as far as I can tell to the details of how they obtained the machine. What's your point?
I don't know about this particular area, but Iran's industrial sector is more advanced than you might think. There is an extensive auto industry. Though it manufactures under licenses from foreign companies (the most common vehicle is a variant of the Peugeot 206), modifications have been designed and implemented in Iran. Iran is no banana republic.
According to http://www.indiaevm.org/, the voting machine studied was "provided by an anonymous source". So it may have been stolen, though apparently by someone else. He might be guilty of something, but it would be receiving stolen property, not theft. Or maybe the source had legitimate access to the machine. It is also not clear whether the machine was returned.
I'm not so sure that this is a good idea. It's bad enough with cab drivers on their cell phones all the time. It'll be even worse if they're on their laptops and iPads.
I liked Waterworld! Did people really hate it so much or is it just /.?
What you say would be true only if potato production were limited to current levels and if there were no surplus. In fact, potato production could be increased to accommodate use for batteries, and in any case th ere is actually a surplus. Total world food production is adequate - the reason that some people starve is poor distribution of the available food, in considerable part due to political reasons. (Starvation in North Korea, for example, is the result of the incompetence of the country's government.)
The news here appears to be the discovery that boiling the potatoes increases their utility for batteries considerably. 4th grade science project potato batteries use raw potatoes, don't they?
If some other service replaces Twitter, there's a good chance that using that service will also be referred to as "tweeting" since the term has become so well established, just as people refer to photocopying as "xeroxing" and to facial tissue as "kleenex". I don't care much for the word "tweet", but then I don't care much for Twitter either - its mostly a huge waste of time and an opportunity for obnoxious egotists to spam out details of their lives that hardly anyone should be interested in. But the word "tweet" is what people are using so its what journalists should use too.
While it's true that money spent on lobbying can have a large impact, Israel is hardly the prime example of this. A far better example is that of Saudi Arabia, a far richer country that has succeeded through lobbying and the cultivation of connections with people like the Bush family in deflecting serious criticism of its awful human rights record and support for Islamic extremism. In the case of Israel there are several additional factors: (a) the very strong moral case for supporting Israel; (b) the fact that Israel is far more representative of American values of freedom, democracy, and transparency than any other state in the Middle East; (c) the significant return that the US gets on its investment in the form of military technology and intelligence; (d) the fact that Israel is a much more genuine ally than the Arab countries, for whom alliance with the US, when it occurs, is a matter of convenience.
That the US has not been a more vocal critic of Israel's interdiction of the jihad flottila reflects an understanding of what is really going on: the flottila was not bringing critically needed aid to Gaza and the people involved were not neutral humanitarians but jihadists and their dupes.
If you think that the purpose of the flottilla was to bring humanitarian aid, consider the following facts: (a) the blockade does not and never has affected critical supplies such as food and medicine; (b) Israel offered to accept the flottilla's cargo, inspect it for contraband (weapons, explosives, and other supplies of military use to Hamas), and pass it on to Gaza by truck if the flottila would dock at Ashdod. The entire dispute is about whether the flottilla would be able to dock and unload unsupervised, not whether aid could be given to Gaza; (c) once Israel seized the ships, it unloaded the cargo, inspected it, and moved it by truck to Gaza; (d) the cargo has not been distributed in Gaza because Hamas has refused to permit it. Evidently they don't think that there is such a humanitarian crisis, or they do, but they don't care as much about the people of Gaza as Israel does; (e) the Egyptian government opened its crossing into Gaza shortly after the seizure of the flottilla. If there were an urgent need for aid, we would expect Free Gaza and other organizations to have taken advantage of this opportunity to move supplies into Gaza. Did they? No. The Egyptian Red Cross moved a modest amount of supplies (mostly tents and things like that) into Gaza. That's it. No rush to move those urgently needed supplies via Egypt. (f) Al-Fatah, the mainline Palestinian organization, the one in actual control of Judea and Samaria and nominal control of the entire Palestinian government, has stated that there is no humanitarian crisis and no urgent need for supplies.
In short, the whole thing is a fraud, a stunt by jihadists and other rabid anti-Israel forces. It is mostly a publicity stunt, though at least one of the "humanitarians" has now bragged that one of their goals was to take Israeli soldiers hostage and that they briefly succeeded before the Israeli forces finally resorted to lethal force and freed the hostage. Fortunately, the US government, whose grasp of foreign affairs I sometimes wonder about, has got this one right and is not jumping on the anti-Semitic bandwagon.
And they thought people would like yet another rebate plan, where you don't see the rebate until weeks later? Even if the rebate is set up automatically and there's nothing that has to be sent in, I'd much rather not pay the extra in the first place and not have to keep track of rebates.
When there is a violation of the gaming laws, like the gambler being under-age, the casino has a rock-solid basis for behaving as if there were no contract because it is black-letter law that a contract that violates the law is unenforceable. It's as if the contract had never been made. So it isn't so much the casino insisting that the gambler abide strictly by the contract - rather, the casino is relying on the fact that legally it has no contractual obligations. In non-legal terms of fairness, I see your point, but there's a sound legal basis for the apparent asymmetry.
No, no, no! For two reasons. First, it's bad for the minority of people in those countries who do not subscribe to the mediaeval theocratic line. For them, the internet is often the major connection to the outside world. Second, even with censorship, and even with skepticism of what unbelievers say, the internet does have an influence in these countries. We should attempt to maximize internet access and support mechanisms for bypassing censorship and preserving anonymity.
Yes, I have drunk coffee in Salt Lake City. Many people don't drink it, and many restaurants don't sell it, but it is neither illegal nor unavailable. You can buy coffee beans in grocery stores and many restaurants do serve coffee. There are at least half a dozen Starbucks in Salt Lake City.
Since when is making a joke about taking drugs something terribly embarrassing that would have an impact on her job as a dispatcher? People make jokes all the time about things they would never do - it doesn't even hint that she actually has a drug problem. This didn't warrant any action against her at all. The real problem that it illustrates is that West Allis has fools in its administration.
I am wondering what the legal basis for the restriction on commercial use might be. US government publications are in the public domain - there is no crown copyright at the federal level in the US. So the only situation in which they can legitimately impose restrictions is when they are reproducing material whose copyright is owned by others.
The monitoring software is a commercial product, isn't it? Anyone know how much it costs? If the cost is non-trivial, it seems likely that someone reasonably high up in the school administration had to approve the purchase and therefore knew what it was for.
How so? In the US, truth is an absolute defense to defamation, so he has no defamation claim. I don't see a privacy-related tort here. I agree that what the Gizmodo people did was rotten, and they may well be criminally liable for receiving stolen property, but I don't see the basis for a tort claim by the guy who lost the device. What is the cause of action that you envision?
First, taking home a school laptop in this situation would be a violation of school rules and possibly a civil matter, but not theft. For it to be a theft, there would have to be a reason to believe that the kid intended to keep it.
Second, the school district's excuse doesn't fit the facts. There's no indication that they didn't know that the kid had the laptop. It was issued to him, and there's no indication that, however they discovered that it wasn't at school, they even bothered to ask him about it. In any case, if they had actually been trying to find a missing laptop, why would they have kept the camera on for two weeks? Did it really take that long to identify the kid? And when he was finally confronted by the school administration, why did they not punish him for improperly taking the laptop home if that was the issue? According to the press accounts, that issue was not raised. Instead, they raised the bogus issue of him popping pills that were actually candy.
No. If you are granted immunity, you can forced to testify.
That's currently true, but the fashion industry has been trying to get Congress to create a kind of copyright on fashion designs.
It sounds like this has been in development for some time, so I wonder if it is really a "me too" product. It doesn't look like a clone.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the problem of slippery road conditions. Slamming on the brakes when you see a yellow light might work on dry pavement, but for those of us who have ice and snow on the roads a significant part of the year, its a very bad idea. The consequences of the resulting skid are likely going to be worse than those of proceeding through the intersection. Not only are sufficiently long yellow lights wise, but around here some intersections have "stop light coming up" signs a good distance ahead of the intersection to warn drivers to slow down and be prepared to stop.