The papers authorising war in Afghanistan were on the President's desk on the 10th September 2001, waiting to be signed. This is completely documented and in the public domain.
The war had nothing to do with 9/11. It was completely pre-planned. The Taliban were promised a "carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs" if they didn't cooperate with the pipeline project. They didn't cooperate.
I could say a lot more -- especially about 9/11 -- but this isn't the site for it.
Wrong. That was a simple typo he made when he first set up the site, when he was still planning to write in over the weekend.
He didn't back out because he thought it would be too hard. According to him, he backed out because it would be disrespectful.
IMO, if he still thinks he can do it, he should do it and make everyone who is putting him down shut up. And if he fails, so what? At least he will learn a lot.
Buy 50k worth of gold & silver bullion as a future proof investment.
Give 10k as a gift to your parents and close family.
40k left. From that, mark 20k for one year living expenses. The remaining 20k, use to launch a business. So you have 1 year where you can work on building your own business without any other worries or stress.
If at the end of that one year, you have failed, get a normal job. If you succeed though, you will turn that 20k in 200k soon enough, God willing.
Make it a goal to be able to retire by the age of 40. Ponder life and the purpose of life and the reason for existence.
CNProg lacks the polish that makes SO what it is. Although it would be more sensible to help out with CNProg rather than build your own, I would have been interested in seeing just how well you were able to do in a weekend.
BTW, what project are you referring to? Let us know once it's done in any case!
Stop talking, start writing! Seriously, if you can do it in two or three days, what are you waiting for?
These guys are experienced businessmen and have analysed and guessed that they can charge $$$ (per month!) for StackExchange and that it will be a success.
If you can put out a clone and charge $$ for it (one time), and allow people to host on their own servers (which StackExchange disallows AFAIK), I'm sure that people will be interested.
Seriously though guys, I don't think it's that difficult to do in a week. Simply because; you've already got a perfect specification and model in StackOverflow. You've just got to copy it and every single feature until it works exactly the same. You even have an open source (CNProg) copy available for code reference if needed.
Do it, I'm waiting for a thread on HN from you and from ktharavaad on monday.
The aside about Internet Marketing -- if you ever look up the terms Internet Marketing or Make Money Online you'll find a wealth of squeeze pages with long copy attempting to convince you that $79.95 or $500 is all you need to make millions on Google. These places are little better than scams targeting the desperate and ignorant. So when I give advice like "Hey, don't sweat the small stuff, speculative spending on SEO is smart even if it doesn't immediately result in sales this time" I wanted to add a disclaimer "But don't get suckered, because exactly those words get repeated by people looking for suckers".
Commentators are “explaining” the Iran elections based on their own illusions, delusions, emotions, and vested interests. Whether or not the poll results predicting Ahmadinejad’s win are sound, there is, so far, no evidence beyond surmise that the election was stolen. However, there are credible reports that the CIA has been working for two years to destabilize the Iranian government.
On May 23, 2007, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported on ABC News: “The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert “black” operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell ABC News.”
On May 27, 2007, the London Telegraph independently reported: “Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs.”
A few days previously, the Telegraph reported on May 16, 2007, that Bush administration neocon warmonger John Bolton told the Telegraph that a US military attack on Iran would “be a ‘last option’ after economic sanctions and attempts to foment a popular revolution had failed.”
On June 29, 2008, Seymour Hersh reported in the New Yorker: “Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country’s religious leadership.”
This recent news flash seems to give more solid evidence of electoral tampering:
"Iran's Guardian Council says the number of votes collected in 50 cities surpass the number of people eligible to vote."
Since the Guardian Council is a highly conservative organization, it can be reasonably surmised that any possible fraud would have to be rather significant for them to make a statement about it.
"Chatham House and the Institute of Iranian Studies at the University of Saint Andrews said that in two conservative provinces, Mazandaran and Yazd, the number of votes cast exceeded the number of eligible voters."
"The study also said that the official results suggest Mr. Ahmadinejad won the support of 47.5 percent of those who backed reformist candidates in 2005. The study's authors called that figure "highly implausible."
That's what I don't understand: Weeks before the election several polls (including ones by Western newspapers) predicted a 2 to 1 win for Ahmadinejad. These predictions were all fairly uncontroversial as far as I could tell.
Now suddenly everywhere I look there's stories about young photogenic Iranians getting shot at while protesting the election results. I keep hearing about claims that the election was rigged but so far I've not seen anything concrete.
The only way I can make sense of this is by assuming infowar / agent provocateur / other covert tactics employed by the USA. Iran has been a thorn in the side of America's middle-eastern foreign interests for a long time, and poking holes in it's democratic process is an important step.
I can't even visit Reddit at the moment, every second story is about Americans getting angry at Ahmadinejad.
i think the reason some people are throwing around the cia/black-ops hypothesis is that all they've ever heard about iran is in the last couple years. which basically meant pursuit of nuclear weapons and a holocaust denying Ahmadinejad. but i think it might help to put the whole thing in a broader context.
what we're seeing right now is another chapter of the iranian revolution. it's been a long story that it started in '79. and these protests themselves are morphing from simply an electoral protest to one that is a continuation of the student protests during khatami's presidency a decade ago.
america has had zero to no presence in iran, much less any tangible way of 'destabalizing' the regime. the money the cia has been throwing at this problem for the last decade has been at things like VOA (voice of america radio broadcasts inside iran) or tacit moral support for minority separatists in iran.
this is not to deny that the west has huge stakes on the outcomes of this, as evidenced by the US government's intervention with the twitter downtime thing and the significant media coverage, or maybe even fake twittering and blogging.
but given the choice of whether an autocratic paranoid regime has rigged the vote to suppress its young population OR a secret cia operation is pulling the levers of what by all accounts seems like an organic grass roots social uprising--i choose the former.
Sorry, did I miss something? Protesters are being shot and killed in Iran, right? American progressives haven't deluded themselves to the point where they think this is just as likely to happen in today's America as it is in Iran, have they?
All of the election polls that I'd seen predicting a 2-1 win also had 40-60 percent of the respondents not responding. That they all broke for Ahmadinejad seems... unlikely.
I am putting together information on the Iranian elections for a report I am doing on the political risks of international investment. The information that I have collected thus far indicated that the highest rate of non respondents in the indicated polls was 43%. That was the rate for the Washington Post poll. Would it be possible for you to share the polling data with me for the polls with non respondent rates higher than 43%. That data would be EXTREMELY helpful to me.
If 40% were undecided (leaving 40% / 20%), that still means that at least three quarters of all the undecideds had to vote against Ahmadinejad for him to lose.
I've seen the argument that people in Iran tend to not have "unpopular" opinions if asked in polls. (I don't know if the population would have been that nervous, considering that only four candidates were allowed out of more than 400.)
Anyway, the opposition party seemed to have a good few last weeks of campaign. Also, there are some bad smells... the uniquely short time to publish results, the way different minorities switched totally from the previous election, etc.
In non-democracies, there are lots of conspiracy theories. (As the joke goes, the population live in a conspiracy theory!) So maybe there weren't outright cheating and the election was "fair", but I'd rather buy a bridge than bet money on that.
Yep, there's obviously a lot going on behind the scenes that we don't know about. The people really behind the Twitter protests is just one part of it.
The papers authorising war in Afghanistan were on the President's desk on the 10th September 2001, waiting to be signed. This is completely documented and in the public domain.
The war had nothing to do with 9/11. It was completely pre-planned. The Taliban were promised a "carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs" if they didn't cooperate with the pipeline project. They didn't cooperate.
I could say a lot more -- especially about 9/11 -- but this isn't the site for it.