Ditto on this. Do what you mentioned above but include a Rick Roll as the apocalyptic catalyst. Just be careful to weigh whether or not it will actually be an apocalyptic catalyst.

These little guys would be totally fucked in Cairo.

Does it seem strange to anyone else that the UK should on one hand wish to make broadband internet ubiquitous, while on the other hand wish to monitor internet traffic so closely?

...does it run Linux? It is only a matter of time before someone (with a shitload of money) starts porting Debian. Could make for some interesting driving. Seriously though, what do you do when this thing won't boot? Makes for some interesting driving.

The reality here is that the riots were partially the result of a movement that developed on Facebook and this is what concerns the government. Egypt is a weak state because the government does not operate with the permission or blessing of the people, is corrupt at ALL levels, and does not provide basic social services. This has caused a great deal of civil unrest here, which is always looking for a way to vent.

In the case of the "food riots" this spring, there was one riots, in an industrial city in the delta, which grew out of a protest/strike by workers there who had been refuse a raise in their salary allowances (salaries are fixed and this is compensated for by way of "allowances" for food and other expenses). A general strike was called for across the country via this movement online, but nothing happened. Since then the government here has increased its surveillance of both local and foreign residents in their use of communications technologies (ie- Apple disabling GPS in Egypt).

What I meant is that the parent's response to the article is pat and static, meaning that it is a foregone conclusion applied to whatever information is presented about "Muslims" or "Arabs" or "the Middle East."

What I mean by "orientalist", specifically, is the theoretical school which developed in the UK and Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The literature produced on the Middle-East and Islam during this period is marked by racist undertones and typically served to support the interests of colonial powers attempting to subjugate the validity of local populations in order to extract resources. For a living, modern-day example of an orientalist, check out Bernard Lewis. For the celebrated discussion of orientalism read Edward Said's Orientalism.

The problem that I was attempting to point out, that I missed my mark on, is that the parent commenter either didn't read the article, or didn't understand what he was looking at. In the case of these kids in Egypt using Facebook for collective action organization, they are not doing this under the guise of the Muslim Brotherhood or any other Muslim group. They are not attempting to advance an "Islamic agenda." They are responding to systematic disenfranchisement on the part of their government, which is very much a reality. If you note in the article, the Brotherhood is mentioned, but in the context that they are not involved, and that there is dissent in the ranks: younger members are using the internet as a way of being harshly critical of organization leadership, viewing them as too extreme.

What this 6th April group found is that even though they could collectivize online, that collective action doesn't translate very well into the real world, where police are involved. The arrests and torture that followed demonstrate this well, but they also (mostly) knew that this would be the response of the Egyptian government.

As for the foundation of the Muslim brotherhood, their aim is not to promote "sharia law," unless you define what you mean by that. "Sharia" is a set of normative principles taken from the Qur'an and the Sunna (reported traditions of the Prophet), which are utilized in generating both legal jurisprudence and behavioral guidelines for Muslims. It is not a law code, no matter how the term has been bandied about by various media talking-heads. The Brotherhood, and many before and after them, attempted to establish a pseudo-modernist revival of an idealized Islamic system which never existed. "Islamic law" can mean a hundred different things. In the case of the Brotherhood, it meant a ultra-conservative retrograde legal system which was inapplicable in the 20th century. This agenda also grew from unrest caused by the systematic disenfranchisement of the local population in Egypt under British colonial authority.

The Brotherhood is still going strong in Egypt, but they have had to alter their agenda hugely in order to maintain any kind of existence, since the party is illegal in Egypt. What the organization that grew out of the Brotherhood does now is act to fill the gaps between what is provided by the government and what is withheld from civil society. In other words, they are using their considerable influence now to perform social services. The "militant" faction of the Brotherhood in Egypt is totally neutered. They have only bark left, no bite. This is not the case in other places, like with Hamas (which was a sister organization based on the same philosophy as the Brotherhood set up by Brotherhood members in Palestine), they perform social services as well, but their militant faction still holds a great deal of influence over the party.

The difference between the unrest that existed in Egypt during the early part of the last century and of the present is that the power that was seen as oppressive then was foreign, and their rhetoric was typically anti-Islamic, so it was easy to garner support for an "Islamic" movement. The Brotherhood was founded because the new leadership in Egypt was seen as being the same as the old leadership: puppets for foreign powers. Now, on the other hand, the government is quasi-Muslim with regard to application of law, even though this is technically a secular state. It is also the case that all of the top government officials are Muslim. So, the formula doesn't work anymore. These new movements, like the Facebook movement and the Kiffeya! movement of 2005-2006 in response to the last "open" presidential election are not based in religious sentiments, nor do they come from conservative groups. These movements are being generated in a growing middle class (which didn't exist until very recently) which is typically reasonably well educated. The Kiffeya! movement (meaning "Enough!") was made up of intellectuals and secularists. This new movement is made up of young people, students often, who believe that the government is actively working to widen the gap between the classes and keep people from questioning its authority by generating small problems (like a bread shortage) and then solving the problems (by having the army bake bread). These tactics are being called into question because more and more Egyptians are becoming well-educated and thinking critically. This has produced a still fledgling liberal, secular opposition here.

For more on this, look at a book called Civil Society Exposed by Maha Abdelrahman (Paperback, 2008, AUC Press). It is a discussion of the interaction between the government and NGOs in Egypt, which mostly serve to fill the gaps between what government services provide to people (practically nothing) and what is needed by people.

I hope that wasn't an overblown response, but you are right, my original response did lack nuance. So, hopefully I was able to explain my reaction to the parent commenter a bit more fully. Thanks.

Mod parent "flamebait."

I am not sure how this got modded "insightful." This is basic orientalist rhetoric with a particularly nasty twist. These sort of baseless comparisons from the point of view of a bigoted lack of understanding don't do anything except breed more ignorance and bigotry.

RTFA would help, as well as reading some history.

RTFA! Your comment has nothing to do with what is happening here. There are people working to advocate for basic human rights. These are not radical groups, these are not Islamists. The Islamists in this country are too busy fight amongst themselves to be truly effective in Egypt. There is nothing about "the Middle East" in the article either.

It is country-specific to Egypt, which is different than other countries in the region, each of which have a different system of governance which is corrupt in different ways and governs in different ways. In the case of Egypt, basic rights are included in the constitution and then undermined by the governmental practices allowed under the "Emergency Law" enacted at the time of Anwar Sadat's assassination.

These groups, many secular, all liberal, are working toward adherence to the guidelines set forth by the constitution rather than allowing the government to continue to operate as a corrupt and broken system made up of bureaucrats lining their pockets with foreign money while the people whom that money was intended to help starve to death and the people trying to help them are imprisoned for social activism.

I know it is not tradition, but RTFA. The Muslim groups here are now being critical of themselves through media like Facebook, with younger members of organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood criticizing the older entrenched dogmatic approaches.

The article is a discussion of people who are using these media to create a sounding board for liberal democratic values, even secular ones. The folks behind the movements are brave indeed, having been subject to imprisonment, brutal interrogation and torture at the hands of the Egyptian government due to the "Emergency Law" which has been in place since the assassination of Anwar Sadat. We're not talking about Muslim extremists here or, indeed, extremists of any kind. We are talking about regular people using whatever resources they have at their disposal to counteract systematic disenfranchisement on the part of the legally secular government in Egypt.

I also didn't find the 'for' loops with hdparm in power.sh. I wonder if there is a difference in version of acpi-support in the Intrepid-proposed updates, which I had installed.

More homework I guess. My "smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count" output 277503. This system is about a year old. Maybe I will buy a new drive and use it as an image backup just in case, and then if there is a problem, I'll just drop it in as a replacement.

Thanks for the info.

That teachers and students can't learn something new or something that is analog to what they already know is simply a limiting belief. It serves its purpose well, though, meaning that many teachers would cry out in agony if you moved their cheese, even as the read that stupid book of the same moniker.

It is because people believe that they cannot do something that they will not do something. This philosophy moves upward within an organization, beginning with individuals. Teachers have been conditioned to believe that they have to go through "training" to do anything new, because they are no longer curious about anything. Thankfully, any "training" that they receive can possibly be considered as "continuing education" and fulfill their NCLB requirements. The problem is that there is no one giant corporate entity railing for free software use in institutions like schools. Even if there were, it is unlikely that teachers would consider switching as anything other than inconvenient, irritating and impossible.

Agreed. the methodology for this study apparently depends on utilizing the internal mental representations which the subjects carry rather than a response to stimulus.

While there may be some truth to this idea (that cities are full of distractions, and that they are difficult for the brain to cope with), the study only shows that the internal mental representations of "city" versus "nature" have an effect on the cognitive response to stimuli. So, perhaps walking down a city street in the state produced by having just stared at pictures of forests and listening to recorded nature sounds is the recommended approach.

On the anecdotal side: I live in Cairo and I'm a social scientist. I like to observe people and their behavior. Since moving here I have noticed that there are a lot of bright, quick-witted people in this teeming city. Then again, there are a lot of dull, slow-witted people as well. It seems to me that the differences between them lies not in stimulus to response-time correlation, but in the presence of higher-order logic in situations which require fast-response. In my anecdotal non-study, it would seem that the foreign expatriates who live here (who typically come from somewhere outside a large city in their countries of origin) lack the higher-order logic in their daily interactions on the street with people. It doesn't again present until they are out of the noise, off the street, and in a--for the English speakers--English-only environment again. Granted, there are loads of possible explanations for this, language being a glaringly obvious one, but it makes me wonder sometimes.

The locals, on the other hand, are sharp as tacks when it comes to figuring out what to do next. They don't usually have a plan that goes beyond a few steps, but that doesn't matter. They are more fluid in their movements and there seems to be greater plasticity in their responses. Some would say opportunist, I would say adapted.

Who knows though? This is all wild speculation, and so is TFA. This is a problem with these types of cognitive science studies, being that we still know very little about the inner workings of the human brain as it relates to the cognitive stuff that makes up a human person. This is not helped by the continued insistence of psychological models to hold on to the separation of "brain" and "mind" at the cognitive level. This was a sloppy oversight on the part of the writer of the summary, in this instance, and not the writers of TFA.