[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by TinyRedLeaf

I'd recommend Alejandro Amenabar's Agora as well. It may not be a documentary like Jesus Camp, but it provides food for thought all the same. After all, the clash between reason and faith is as old as civilisation.

I'd love to see this film, but prospects for it arriving in the US so far seem bleak. Reports surfaced last fall that it was licensed by an American distributor, but there's no evidence of that on the IMDB list of release dates.

While this film clearly doesn't seem destined for "boffo" returns in the US market, I wonder if its celebration of an atheist in conflict with early Christians gives a bit of scare to the folks in the executive suites.

Originally Posted by karthak

Read on the bbc that one of the women suspected of being one of the bombers was the widow of a militant who got killed by the russian military. Seems like she wanted payback.

"Black widows," as they are known in Chechnya, are the female relatives of men killed by Russian forces in that land. There's an excellent discussion of them in this contribution to the NY Times.

In total, 24 Chechen females ranging in age from 15 to 37 have carried out suicide attacks, including the most deadly — the coordinated bombings of two passenger flights in August 2004 that caused 90 deaths and (according to Russian authorities) the subway blasts on Monday that killed nearly 40.

Those 24 women represent fully forty percent of Chechen suicide bombers.

Originally Posted by FDW

I think [the iPad] will succeed, at least at first. Though I can see apple eventually loosing ground like it did back the late 80's for the same reasons: it's competitors will put up something similar that is far more open to third-party development than the iPad is.

NPR's story on the iPad today suggests that Apple's "walled garden" approach makes its products much more appealing in a world awash with viruses and other malware. It would be ironic indeed if Microsoft's long-time foot-dragging on security issues leads ultimately to Apple's success. While I personally favor open systems, I can understand how they might have much less appeal to people who want computers to work like appliances.