I think the above poster makes an excellent point, and I think this is what posters are missing here in the discussion. There's piracy in the developed, western countries that is well known here on Slashdot, where people who can probably afford the price of the media (they might not be able to buy a 6 pack that weekend or something, but it's within their budget) choose to pirate instead.

On the other hand, as the OP notes, in developing countries, piracy IS the market. I lived in Syria, and honestly I don't know where I'd buy a legitimate version of something. The markets are dominated by pirated goods, because if you do eventually find the one fancy mall* that has a legitimate outlet, the goods will be priced at the same price as in the US or Europe. I wanted to get a DVD in Jordan, and at the Virgin Megastore, it was priced HIGHER than most DVDs in the US - few Jordanians could afford such a thing, and so they turn to piracy.

There was interestingly, while I was in Syria, an independent record label that managed to distribute a fair number of CDs actually managed to control piracy a little bit by distributing to the same places that sold pirated CDs, and working out agreements with the owners of the shops not to pirate the CDs. However, sales of CDs at $4 each still had trouble finding a market, versus $.50 pirated CDs in a country where $.75 could buy you a takeaway lunch ($4 could get you a pretty nice lunch at a good restaurant). If you think of that in terms of a $6 sub sandwich in the US, it was the equivalent of pricing a CD at about $32 US. If a US company tried to charge $15 for a CD, it would be like charging $80 for a CD in terms of buying power.

*Actually, in one mall, they had a store that LOOKED like Best Buy or something, but all of their DVDs were indeed pirated.

It currently looks like people are switching to more old fashioned means and using leaflets and word of mouth. Hold in mind that though Cairo, and many other Arab capitals are gigantic, they are often much more similar to a huge collection of small towns where everyone knows everyone (and everyone's business). Taking out the internet seems like a particularly desperate act, especially since the protests are expected to begin following Friday prayer (which the government can't forbid completely without REALLY losing legitimacy) when people will be gathered together already (and thus able to communicate.)

By that set of criteria, Iraq and Syria are "secular" states as well, based on largely secular principles. If you use Roman alphabets as a criteria, then you'd have to include Malaysia and Indonesia, two of the largest Muslim population countries in the world. The whole problem with the original poster's (troll's) assertions is that they're a flawed generalization.

Jesus, where to even start with this modded "Insightful" and the other terrible comments coming off it.

First, all the issues you cite, "Human rights, crime, despotism, corruption, justice, the works" characterize the vast majority of countries outside of Western Europe (and you can include the Commonwealth in that) and North America, and don't correlate per se with states with majority Muslim populations any more than it correlates with years since the end of colonization or national GDP (and obviously probably much much less.) Most of those "more progressive" states have had quite a good amount of time to develop as nation states and many have had similar human rights problems in the past (e.g. much of Eastern Europe, Spain), while most of the Middle Eastern and North African countries are still one or two major regimes off of colonialism. So you have made a false equivalence of Muslim majority state=horrendous when there are exceptions on both sides of that equation.

Furthermore, in many of the "worst" states, the governments have been aggressively secular, since they were run by minority groups (Syria, Iraq before the fall of Saddamn) and were not particularly "Islamic" in character.

As for another poster who wonders whether they have honor killings, not so much, that tends to be in the Levant, and is a cultural rather than a religious ideal per se. Egypt does have issues with "female circumcision" (or whatever you want to call it) but again it's a cultural rather than religious practice.

None of that is pertinent to what's going on, though.

What is important is that these are incredibly courageous youth going out into the streets and facing who knows what - recent videos have shown what appears to be snipers firing on protesters, and one thing that has contributed to this movement has been videos of police brutally torturing prisoners - in the hope of changing their situation. They are putting their money where their mouths are, and are defying death to make themselves heard. This is a government that is willing to shut off an entire country's internet access, with all that entails for the economy and communication, to keep people from gather together, a basic right in many countries in the world. Coptic Christians are standing beside Muslims and asking for change - one of the main chants is "al-halaal wa-ya saliib did al-qatal wa-t-ta`dhiib" "Cross and Crescent against torture and murder."

So lets stop making meaningless and false generalizations, and asking kind of silly questions about culture, and support a people trying to win back their freedoms, something that should appeal quite highly to the Slashdot crowd.

There're two websites that are relevant to this discussion:

One is the joke website, "This is why you're fat" and the exercise website 70s Big.

The both show almost absurd kinds of food. However, the difference between them is that the members of the latter website regularly spending 3-6 (not much, huh?) hours a week weightlifting between one and four times their body weight. For heavy weightlifting and other kinds of training, 3000-6000 Calories is really pretty reasonable, and in fact recommended to make major gains in strength.

Weightlifting is a great way to lose weight (or to lose fat weight) while gaining a lot of strength and getting better looking. A lot of geeks tend to be scared of it, but it's actually a pretty scientific and geeky pursuit.

So that link you provide (modded informative?!) doesn't actually say anything about translations of the Quran - it's mostly about apostasy, which in the early years of Islam (during which those hadith were uttered) was politically equivalent to treason (which is often greeted with a death penalty around the world). In the early years of Islam, it really was Islam against the world, and the religious and political element were aligned such that all supporters of Muhammad were Muslim and vise-versa (plus or minus some civil wars). In modern society, the application of these hadith I think is questionable, but I'm not an Islamic studies scholar (just an Arabic Ph.D. student). There's also an image attached to the article that is just a judgment regarding apostasy rendered by the extremely conservative al-Azhar mosque, and has nothing to do with translation. Clearly non-Arabic readers would assume it does, which makes it rather sneaky.

As for translating the Quran, that's not controversial at all - the idea is that you can't really get the same thing out of it by translation that you'd get out of it by reading it (and in fact, that's not the same as what you get out of it by reading the commentaries, which are long and voluminous). A translation by necessity is one particular person's interpretation of the text, so to impose your interpretation is in a sense to change the original text. I might add one persons READING of a text is necessarily an interpretation, but at least they can bring their intellect, background, etc to bear on the original text. If you read someone else's translation, the idea is that you're not reading the word of god, but rather the word of god filtered through someone else's lense. So if you get a Saudi Wahhabi translation, it might have a significantly different take on the text than a liberal western educated translator.

With other texts, obviously, it's not quite as critical, and its often more accepted to translate hadiith (sayings of the prophet), and non-religious stuff has always been fair game - where do you think we get Greek philosophical works from? They were primarily translated out of Syrian and Greek by Arab translators, particularly under the Caliph al-Ma'muun.

I would go for a nice peat bog burial - there's a great chance you would be discovered some 2300 years out. And if not, you'll also live on in some delicious scotch.

I will add to this as a grad student in Arabic linguistics and culture:

In Arab/Middle Eastern and generally third world culture, there is a lot more value placed on getting a degree in something that will be lucrative. Becoming a doctor or engineer is extremely important in these societies (lawyers don't make much, so it's not as important), and a system of testing reinforces this: only students who get the highest scores on the tests can enroll in the medical and engineering faculty of most Middle Eastern universities, while the lower the test score is the more liberal artsy the degree will be. I knew a couple of girls who really wanted to study biomedical engineering, but ended up in the English language and literature department due to their test scores.

There is also an immense amount of pressure to get a degree in a prestigious, money making field, which pushes a lot of students to pursue these degrees.

The results of this study, however, aren't necessarily applicable to the situation in the Middle East, I feel. First, liberal arts educations in the Middle East do NOT emphasize critical thinking. Like almost all fields, they focus on memorization - all tests in almost all departments are multiple choice. Some of my friends who study liberal arts subjects there have never had to write an essay - when one of them did, it was terrible, and failed to advance a critical thesis in any way shape or form. It's not like the US, where students are trained to deconstruct everything in liberal arts, while in engineering its more mathmatical. In the Middle East, both science and liberal arts are taught in substantially similar ways, with a strong emphasis on memorization.

Second, many students who do become engineers do so for economic reasons, not because of their personal interests. Almost all major literary figures in the Middle East had day jobs, and engineering is not necessarily a bad choice. A friend in Damascus is a struggling actor, but he's enrolled in a engineering program since his parents wouldn't support him otherwise. Thus, the kind of self selection that is important to the authors' argument really isn't at play to the same degree in the Middle East as it would be in the US.

I think the point that people miss is that every country has some degree of corruption, but it is what levels it is active at and how they deal with that corruption that is important.

In the US, what we might term "corruption" in the sense of favoritism (or deviations from a US sense of "meritocracy") tend to occur at the very local level (small town nepotism, "networking", etc), or at the more rarefied levels of government and business (quod pro quos from both of the political parties, lobbying, the kind of no-bid blackwater/Halliburton sort of think, insider trading, etc). This isn't to say that corruption at the top is not a problem (in fact, it is much more influential in the long run than corruption at the bottom), but simply in the US it tends to be limited to the upper reaches of government and finance.

In many other countries, the striking contrast to this is corruption in the middle, in addition to the top and bottom. Getting a job is basically impossible in some countries without appropriate connections, bribery is rampant and expected for basic "government provided" services, public works are often mired in those same problems of bribery (not scratching enough backs, etc). Even worse is when the guardians of civil society, the police, are dangerous to approach and more often on the side of criminals, as in Russia.

The other major dividing line is the public reaction to exposure of corruption. In societies where corruption is most widespread, "revelations" are generally shrugged off (and have been probably more widely known prior to their revelation), whereas in less corrupt economies, there is at least some backlash against corruption, rather than simple apathy or active suppression. Being a whistleblower in the US can be bad for your job. Being a whistleblower in other countries (as shown by many of the posts pointing out other instances where political opponents have been assassinated, etc) can result in indefinite incarceration and torture, perhaps with an "accidental" death in prison.

The advent of youtube, on the other hand, gives a voice to those who would be otherwise suppressed. Take the story of Imad Kabir, an Egyptian taxi driver. He was arrested (without charges) for participating in a fight. He was subsequently sodomized with a broomstick, which was video taped by the perpetrators. They were so sure of their immunity that they showed it to his co-workers, perhaps as a warning. When Kabir initially complained, he was actually prosecuted and jailed for assaulting an officer (dating back to his original assault arrest), but as the youtube video spread on various blogs, the officers were finally arrested. Without the internet, the officers who tortured Kabir probably would still be doing that kind of shit. Even the people who did post it to their blogs were threatened by the authorities.

Now I finally know what it'll take to put together a winning application package...just have to cut and paste some naughty pictures into my statement of purpose, and voila!