TDDPirate’s Ideas

After attending the August Penguin 2010 conference, Ilana Benish wrote (in Hebrew) about the benefits of Free Software for people with disabilities.

I would like to make also the following points:

• Working on Free Software projects, like working on any volunteer work, is a way for software developers with disabilities to prove their worth to prospective employers.  This can serve to overcome prejudices and resistance by prospective employers, especially those who were burned by people who proved to be capable of drawing a salary and incapable of delivering results.
• Like working on other self-benefit projects, working on relevant Free Software projects can empower people with disabilities, who can now help themselves rather than rely upon other people to help them.

1. My accounting is simple:The terrorists, who were released in exchange for Elechanan Tanenbaum few years ago, have murdered 29 Israelis by now in terror attacks.

   There is no doubt that the terrorists, whose release is demanded by Hamas in exchange for freeing Gilad Shalit, will murder even more Israelis in the next few years.

   The only difference among Gilad Shalit and those Israelis is that today we know who is Gilad Shalit, and we can associate with him a photo, parents in distress and a life story.  Whereas those dead Israelis are today nameless and we have no way to associate with them a photo, grieving relatives or life story.  Only after they have lost their lives, we’ll know who they were.

2. Another aspect which no one seems to have thought about:Suppose Gilad Shalit is freed in exchange for all those terrorists and returns to live in Israel.  How will his life look like under the burden of Israelis who are killed or otherwise put at risk by those terrorists?  Won’t he feel obliged to live up to them as they sacrificed their lives to release him?  Won’t he be able to enjoy his life as a free man without onerous obligations?  Would he be able to live normal life under the weight of obligations to those who risked and sacrificed their lives to secure his release?

Those days Turkey is rapidly transforming from an ally and friend of Israel into an enemy, to be almost as dangerous as Iran.

The Turkey-related news of the last few days never fail to remind me of the transformation of Anakin Skywalker in “Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith” into Darth Vader.

I wonder what will be NATO’s stand if war starts between Turkey and Israel due to Erdoğan’s plans to break through Gaza blockade by personally escorting ships and accompanying them by Turkish navy ships.

Addendum:
I don’t like the incitatory slant of the article, however it provides a possible explanation of the environment which allowed Turkey to make the transformation into an enemy of Israel:  Turkey-vs-Israel. ANOTHER War in the Middle East?

I am not as optimistic as the article’s author about Israeli chances of winning a war against Turkey, because Turkey has been provided over the years with Israeli military technology.  Even today, the relevant contracts haven’t been suspended yet as far as I know.

The only way I see to avoid a Turkish-Israeli war is for the Turkish army to get hold of its wits and overthrow Erdoğan in a military coup, similar to past coups, which happened in Turkey over the years.

The story of Barack Hussein Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is well known.
He got the prize without having accomplished much before winning it.

Few days ago I faced a similar (but in much smaller scale) situation.
I sometimes volunteer to help in area A.  There is a nonprofit B, whose mission is to support volunteers in area A.

Among other things, each year, nonprofit B selects few finalists and the Volunteer of the Year and gives them prizes.  Members of the nonprofit may nominate anyone they believe to deserve the Volunteer of the Year prize.

What happened was that to my surprise, I found myself among those who were nominated for the Volunteer of Year 2010 prize.  I did volunteer to some tasks, requiring only few hours each.  However I felt very uncomfortable being in a situation in which I could get this year’s prize or being one of the finalists.

On the other hand, my getting the prize would have signalled empowerment of people with disabilities.

After some thought, I withdrew my candidacy for the 2010 prize.  When questioned by a member of the committee in charge of selecting the winners, I explained that I did very little to deserve the prize.  On the other hand, I recently started a bigger project, and if it gets accomplished, I’ll feel comfortable getting the 2011 prize.

I am not particularly modest, neither am I in desperate search for honors or recognition.  Why, then, did I avoid this year’s prize?

The reason was that if I were in position to get the prize this year, it would have chaepened the prize in my eyes, and possibly also in others’ eyes.  Next year, if I accomplish that project, my getting the prize would honor both me and the prize.

On the other hand, one could argue that the Nobel Peace Prize was already irreversibly cheapened by having it granted to Yasser Arafat, who proved to be utterly incapable to steer his people toward peacefully building their territory and getting persperous, and away from terror against civilians.  So it didn’t matter anymore that Obama got it for essentially nothing

Star Trek TNG world:

• The Game
• The Game

Real World:

• Facebook’s Farmville (a sample testimonial by a newly-addicted victim)

In the wake of the Rav Moti Alon scandal, I reach the conclusion that homosexual Jewish rabbis and Moslem religious leaders are in the same risk category as Catholic priests.  The common difficulty, which all of them encounter is the lack of a legal (from their religion’s perspective) means to satisfy their desires.

In today’s world, no act of legitimate self-defense or good deed by Israel goes unpunished. The story of the woman from Gaza, who tried to smuggle a bomb in her person when entering Israel for medical treatment, is known. Israel is accused of committing war crimes during the Cast Iron operation, nevermind the years of war crimes committed by the other side - the Palestinians in Gaza especially after the Israeli pull out from the Gaza Strip at 2005.

The most recent twist is the accusations that Israel utilizes the medical aid to Haiti as a pretext to steal organs for transplanting.

The best response to this accusation and others related to Israeli aid to Haiti, which I saw so far, is in  http://www.rantrave.com/Rave/Israeli-Aid-to-Haiti.aspx. The writer challenges the accusers to compete with Israel and overshadow its aid efforts by efforts of their own.

Whenever you feed people, who could not feed themselves, please do not only shed tears on their bad fortunes.  Please do not stop at providing them with a meal.
Please ask them about the circumstances, which prevented them from being self-sufficient.

Then do something to ameliorate those circumstances.  Sometimes you can do a lot for the price of a single meal for a group of people.

I suspect that several responses will go along the following lines.

• People past retirement age - why couldn’t they save in their retirement funds?  Probably they saved and lost the money to crooks or bad investments.
• People with disabilities - what inaccessible places and circumstances prevented them from exercising their full earning potential?
• Unemployed - probably need vocational training to train for an occupation with higher demand.  The expense consists of both tuition, free time for study, and stipend to live on while studying.

Some people will turn out to be lazy bums with feeble excuses - they should NOT be fed.

If you have a lot of money to donate, usually the best way to use it to help those non self-supporting people - is to make it easier for them to train for a better paying occupation.

The following is an adaptation of the English translation of a talkback, which I wrote in response to an article in Ira Abramov’s blog (written in Hebrew), which commented on the results of the elections held in Israel at 2009 February 10, whose results showed the decline of the Israeli Left.

I do not think that the Israeli Left lost the elections due to leadership failures, divisiveness or other nonsense.

I think that it was a victory of the Palestinians in their war against the Israeli Left, pure and simple.

• After Rabin’s murder at November 1995, there was widespread support for Shimon Peres (who advocated the same pro-Palestinian policy, which caused Yigal Amir to murder Rabin). Until the elections were at last held at 1996, the support passed to Bibi Netanyahu and he won landslide victory in the elctions. Who helped him? All those Palestinian terrorists, who exploded busses during the months between murder and elections.
• One of the consequences of the Al-Aqsa intifada, which started at 2000, and which included terror attacks committed by suicide bombers almost every day, was that several people from the Israeli Left felt that they no longer have a partner in the other side, and withdrew support for policy of appeasement toward the Palestinians.
• The third round of the war between the Palestinians and the Israeli Left was held during the years from the Disengagement until now. The By continuing to launch missiles from Gaza Strip into Israel, the Palestinians provided ammunition to those forces in the Israeli Right, who opposed the Disengagement and demonstrated and blocked roads in an attempt to stop the Disengagement.

After such battles, which ended with unequivocal victory of the Palestinians, why does anyone still wonder that the Israeli Left lost its influence over Israeli politics?

Suppose you have been contacted by someone with a great Web 2.0 idea and he wants you to join his startup.
You need to know whether he knows what he is talking about.
The following checklist may help you tell the clueful apart from clueless.
I hope people will be able to contribute advice concerning each item in the checklist as well as more items I missed.

1. Dealing with bad content:
   • Spam
   • Trolling
   • Off-topic user-contributed content
2. Vandalism (and in general, content backup/restore).
3. Legal:
   • Acceptable use guidelines
   • Copyright violations and other issues
4. Content ownership/lockdown policies - will a contributor be able to export his contributions into file/s in his own PC?
5. How will the network effect be overcome (if another Web 2.0 site already exists serving the same need, how to get people to use your Web site instead of the other site, if they already have stuff).
6. Business model (i.e. how to actually get people to pay for the stuff).
7. Scaling with demand (nowadays, thanks to cloud computing services availability, the required scaling is not that of servers but that of customer service personnel and maybe other critical resources).
8. Are there standards (such as XML schema) relevant to the kind of content to be served by the site?