Good point. What makes things even worse is that the terrorists don't have to actually pull off an attack. Just threatening it might be enough.

I have never been in a theme park in a place where the wages are as low as they are in Jordan. I suspect that:

1. They'll be over staffed by our standards.
2. Security will be walking around with their sniffing dogs, all the way from the parking lot to the gate.

It will probably be a bit more difficult. How much do you want to bet there will be explosive sniffing dogs and metal detectors at the entrance? It would be vulnerable, but an attack will be harder.

Most of the Jordanian population lives in the west, close to the Jordan river - not in the east. It is about a thousand miles from Amman (the capital) or Aqaba (the one port and the location of the park) to the Persian Gulf.

I think this is stimulus spending. Abdullah doesn't want to have the problems of his neighbors to the north (Syria) and south-west (Egypt).

With luck and really good security, they might be able to get a lot of tourists from Israel.

We're talking about surveillance cameras located in police cars. Do you:

1. Attack the car with the cops still in it, getting into a violent confrontation with people trained to fight.

or

2. Break into the police station at night to destroy the surveillance cameras, when the place is, well, also guarded.

Try voting the bastards out. It's hard, but a lot less bloody.

The alphabet started in Phoenicia, but that only means that the Arabic alphabet and the Latin alphabet are cognates. The letters look very different, the direction of writing is opposite, etc. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet).

You mean the ones invented in India (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_numerals)? Yes. But the difference is that everybody in the west uses those numerals. OTOH, Arabs still use their own alphabet for almost everything.

Notice that he is using our alphabet, not the one used in Arabic.

I guess they meant "wide", considering this is horizontal.

If he is going to live in Silicon Valley, he will pay one of the highest state tax rates in the country. Although I don't know how much of that goes for his less fortunate peers, and how much to groups that have lobbying power.

The issue is that not all engineers like writing and are competent at it. For those that aren't, it might make sense to outsource the task to an English major.

Aristotle could afford not to worry about making a living, because he was an aristocrat with slaves working for him. We aren't.

Being a US citizen doesn't help you in a country where you're also a local citizen. If he is also a Thai citizen, he is treated as such in Thailand.

The 12 tablets were written around ~450 BC. This is about two centuries after Draco's written code, the first written code of Athens ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draco_(lawgiver) ). The written legal codes in Exodus and Deuteronomy probably predate that, and the one in Deuteronomy specifically states it should be taught to everybody.

The Hammurabi code is much earlier, but I don't know how common literacy was back then.

Education, and the costs there of, should not be operated on a supply and demand curve, especially not one so fine grained as by course of study.

Why? We're not talking about elementary school here, but about a significant spending decision by supposed adults.