Ok. Definitely no more reading by Philip Greenspun. Yuck! Actually it is a tendency with blogs – you start sticking to the people that agree with you. I guess we should hope that people will read similar but not identical opinions, and thus – slowly – they are swayed and learn. Or maybe we share opinions on a lot of things and occasionally we learn something completely new because the other person doesn’t share all our interests. Perhaps the tendency is not all-bad after all.
Anyway, back to Greenspun’s posting from 2003-09-04 ¹:
Karl Taylor Compton, one-time president of MIT, was a believer in technology. Here are his words from 1938: “In recent times, modern science has developed to give mankind, for the first time, in the history of the human race, a way of securing a more abundant life which does not simply consist in taking away from someone else.”
The Arab world does not share this perspective. In a region where illiteracy is common and people lack the ability to manufacture the most simple items the best way to get richer is in fact to steal from neighbors (viz. Iraq’s takeover of Kuwait in 1990).
Oh, it is *the Arab world*, eh? All of them, I guess. Or only their governments? I also wonder who put the governments in power or supported them when they got there.
Buying oil from people who hate Americans causes deaths. Without Saudi wealth, all of which is derived from oil sales, Sept. 11th would not have been possible nor would various embassy bombings and other mass killings of Westerners (at least 5000 people in the last couple of years).
The wealth enables them to do something, but the question remains: Why do they hate Americans?
Anyway, I added that to the comments on his page ².
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Oh and I’m going to install Open Office for Debian from one of the mirrors listed by linux-debian.de ³. Claudia needs an office suite.
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Still thinking about my ShureHeadphones...