This may be an unpopular view, but I can understand why they did this. Without a fine, we wouldn't be talking about this, and they'd have to spend time and money trying to find and stop this kind of thing in the future.
How would you contrast this 'echo chamber' perspective with a more realistic one? Is there a strong conservative movement among the young which is underrepresented in this article?
Yes, the vast majority of Iranian youth are quite poor and have no real prospects for gaining employment or wealth or moving up in the world except the one presented by the theocratic regime.
For them the only prospect is to ingratiate themselves through the basij and other similar organizations so they can then gain employment with the government or with the many bonyads which overwhelmingly control the Iranian economy.
Employment with the government or bonyads is not based on merit but through a test of loyalty to the Islamic revolutionary ideas. If you can distinguish yourself through zealous service and unquestioning devotion, then you stand a chance of gaining a foothold.
By the by, the Basij were the ones on the front lines in the 2009 protests brutally suppressing the street marchers.
That's the only possible avenue of advancement for the vast majority of Iran's youth who do not come from a 'connected family' and/or do not have a wealthy family that will give them a leg up.
Agreeing with personal anecdote: the more people under 30 I met there, the more scary it was and relieving to me that I was never as stuck as they will have been their whole lives.
Slashdot introduced me to ArsDigita, which introduced me to web programming and linux, leading me out of the depths of a corporate visual basic dead-end job. I'm very grateful for the impact this had on my life. Thanks, Rob.
We recently wrote a tool which can populate our DNS entries in either Route 53 or another provider (can't recall which). So if one goes down, we can run a script which brings up our DNS entires in the alternate provider.
I guess someone could service-fy this and have a meta-DNS service which let you switch backend providers.
You could leave them both live with your name server entries pointing at both as well. Then there is nothing to do if only one of them goes down. Waiting until one goes down will mean that requests aren't being served to anyone getting a cached DNS entry with references to the previous hosts.
It's "liquid water" in the same sense that the molton rock inside the earth is "liquid rock".
Here when we see water outside of it's natural state (liquid) it's frozen or evaporated. Out there ice (solid) is the natural state, so it's molten or (vaporized ???).
Oh, definitely. I was (poorly?) highlighting that molten/frozen/vaporized/etc are used relative to the normal state for a substance at "local" temperature.
You're right, a typical programmer would write the website before understanding the business like these guys have. However, they are now vulnerable to price wars with copy cats, and need tools to reduce their costs below their competitors'. This is when scalability means the difference between decreasing margins and a growing business.
Sorry to hear you had a bad experience. 2008 was a long time ago, though. I'm ex-Red Hat and know first hand that there can be hiccups in the hiring process, but overall it's a really great place to work. Very few places have have FOSS as a cultural value like they do.
