Re:Where the checkpoints are - magic explained
on
Business Under Fire
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· Score: 1
er, last time I checked, much of the land was actually owned by the Church (mainly Greek Orthodox I think, but all of the others here have large chunks). You can walk from Jerusalem to Hebron (i.e the southern part of the West Bank) on Church land. In fact the Israeli parliament is on Church land and next to a Monastery (the Valley of the Cross).
I have to say that I love the fact that the Palestinians have land which they all seem to own collectively. Where is the Americans land? Where is French land?
My point is not that they don't deserve a sovereignty and self determination in an 1880's Western Europe-style nation state like the rest of us, but rather we apply words and terms to conflicts in the Middle East that we don't use anywhere else.
yeah if you look back historically, the majority of Arabs were agricultural peasants, the Jews were literate city-based merchants who had trading ties across the Med and the various rulers made good money from them and protected them. It's not like there was a consistently wonderful cultural melting pot (although it's not like it was consistently awful either).
Muslims don't like minority communities too much as they are infidels. Sounds dogmatic, but that's the way they view things (whether they engage in active daily implementation of their beliefs is another thing). That's one of the reasons that Hamas has been pressuring the Christian Arabs who used to comprise a much bigger % of population out of Bethlehem over the past few years. I say bring back the dictators - at least you know you can count on them with a bit of cash!
Merry Christmas.
Re:How Israeli Companies Are Succeeding...
on
Business Under Fire
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· Score: 2, Informative
A couple of clarifications here actually
- the money the govt. here gets from the US is normally for US made equipments (weapons, vehicles) so actually the foreign aid is used for propping up the US armaments industry.
- the founders of modern Israel were profoundly secular. The religious mouth frothing is a more modern phenomenon due to the outstanding military success of the Six Day war in 1967.
- Historically in this part of the world, unless you had a meanie dictator (historically the Turkish Emperor, but more recently people like Saddam Hussein and Hafez Assad) the various communities start scheming against each other (Lebanon in the 80's, Iraq now....). It's a bit more complex than "Israel has a strong military, that's why the Arabs hate them and that's why the price of oil is so high".
As someone who works in a company which does FOSS and commercial stuff too, I obviously have a (financial) interest to watch this debate.
Firstly, I find the trend amongst OSS developers to just build free versions of commercial stuff is very problematic. Yes you can say we're making a better version, but truth is, that many users will go with free from a financial perspective, not coz the software is better. So e.g. Microsoft/Apple/Adobe spends years of market research and focus groups to develop new features - and other people just copy it. I reckon most (not all) modern day FOSS is simply parasite-ware.
Eventually there will be no incentive for anyone to make much new. Let's face it, we all have to eat so great, we can all starve together and eat from Paypal donations.
Secondly, what is this absurd assumption in OSS is it so moral to make money off of selling software services rather than sellling code? Is this simply because most people writing into/. make money by selling their IT services.... My point is - is this a logical point or are you just simply fighting your own corner (as I am).
Lastly, will OSS become less interesting to end users as we move to a more network-based computing world? i.e. do I care whether it's LAMP or Java or MSFT behind the online service I'm using? The way to protect your code is to create a whole managed service web infrastructure and service behind it....
I have more to say, but you're probably yawning if you got this far...
Slashdot Mirror
er, last time I checked, much of the land was actually owned by the Church (mainly Greek Orthodox I think, but all of the others here have large chunks).
You can walk from Jerusalem to Hebron (i.e the southern part of the West Bank) on Church land. In fact the Israeli parliament is on Church land and next to a Monastery (the Valley of the Cross).
I have to say that I love the fact that the Palestinians have land which they all seem to own collectively. Where is the Americans land? Where is French land?
My point is not that they don't deserve a sovereignty and self determination in an 1880's Western Europe-style nation state like the rest of us, but rather we apply words and terms to conflicts in the Middle East that we don't use anywhere else.
yeah if you look back historically, the majority of Arabs were agricultural peasants, the Jews were literate city-based merchants who had trading ties across the Med and the various rulers made good money from them and protected them. It's not like there was a consistently wonderful cultural melting pot (although it's not like it was consistently awful either).
Muslims don't like minority communities too much as they are infidels. Sounds dogmatic, but that's the way they view things (whether they engage in active daily implementation of their beliefs is another thing). That's one of the reasons that Hamas has been pressuring the Christian Arabs who used to comprise a much bigger % of population out of Bethlehem over the past few years. I say bring back the dictators - at least you know you can count on them with a bit of cash!
Merry Christmas.
A couple of clarifications here actually
- the money the govt. here gets from the US is normally for US made equipments (weapons, vehicles) so actually the foreign aid is used for propping up the US armaments industry.
- the founders of modern Israel were profoundly secular. The religious mouth frothing is a more modern phenomenon due to the outstanding military success of the Six Day war in 1967.
- Historically in this part of the world, unless you had a meanie dictator (historically the Turkish Emperor, but more recently people like Saddam Hussein and Hafez Assad) the various communities start scheming against each other (Lebanon in the 80's, Iraq now....). It's a bit more complex than "Israel has a strong military, that's why the Arabs hate them and that's why the price of oil is so high".
As someone who works in a company which does FOSS and commercial stuff too, I obviously have a (financial) interest to watch this debate. Firstly, I find the trend amongst OSS developers to just build free versions of commercial stuff is very problematic. Yes you can say we're making a better version, but truth is, that many users will go with free from a financial perspective, not coz the software is better. So e.g. Microsoft/Apple/Adobe spends years of market research and focus groups to develop new features - and other people just copy it. I reckon most (not all) modern day FOSS is simply parasite-ware. Eventually there will be no incentive for anyone to make much new. Let's face it, we all have to eat so great, we can all starve together and eat from Paypal donations. Secondly, what is this absurd assumption in OSS is it so moral to make money off of selling software services rather than sellling code? Is this simply because most people writing into /. make money by selling their IT services.... My point is - is this a logical point or are you just simply fighting your own corner (as I am).
Lastly, will OSS become less interesting to end users as we move to a more network-based computing world? i.e. do I care whether it's LAMP or Java or MSFT behind the online service I'm using? The way to protect your code is to create a whole managed service web infrastructure and service behind it....
I have more to say, but you're probably yawning if you got this far...