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MOD PARENT UP, YOU COCKS!

I fully agree with this poster, who is obviously a fine, upstanding American. The Chinee are lazy, shifty, wily, and untrustworthy! I was personally robbed blind by one of the Yellow Vipers, who looted me of the bulk of my fortune! I awoke nearly penniless, in a home bereft of furniture. The only clue to my predicament was a note stapled to my bedshirt which read "I saw you with the maid. Love, Wong."

That's the last time I marry one of those godless Easterners.

somewhere in to dark and dingy russian governmment office:

Comrad 1)"Comrad, Some guy on Slashdot says we should DO something about all the criminals."
Camrad 2) "He's a GENIUS! we should have thought about that years ago!"

1954:
They are godless, opressive governmant with and aggressive military.It's bleedin obvious where all the problems come from, it's time for something to happen.

2004:
They write all of the major viruses, distribute drugs, and distribute weapons. It's bleedin obvious where all the problems come from, it's time for something to happen.

> The overthrow of the godless regimes and their replacement with an Islamic regime

Well, the solution is simple then. Line up everyone in the world. Ask their religion. If they say anything other than "none," shoot them in the head.

Then I will conquer the rest! Muwahahahahaaaaaa!!!

" Their goal is to cause chaos, to make people live their lives differently, by what the terrorists dictate."
Partially true. But not entirelly. I have seen Al-Quaeda documents that have a picture of the globe with a sword through it. I have read parts of an Al-Quaeda training manual that says:
"The main mission for which the Military Organization is responsible is:
The overthrow of the godless regimes and their replacement with an Islamic regime."
And the methods listed for accomplishing that mission are horrendous.
These people really believe that they can destroy us, and that is their goal. I do not believe in giving up my basic freedoms, but I do believe in taking action to make sure the world is free of these terrorists. We need to go on with our lives, but we need to do so in caution. We cannot let down our guard and allow these people to continue training and plotting against us. We need to do exactly what we are doing in the Middle East right now.
And no, I do not believe they want us to fight back. They just want us to cower in fear and leave ourselves venerable to more attacks. They do not want us to defeat them on their own ground. Their plan doesnt work if they are all dead or in prison, nor does it work when they have no organization. Do you think the Al-Quaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan can spend much time planning for an attack on American soil if they are too busy worried about trying to lash out at our bases in Afghanistan? I dont.

Please, whatever you do, don't judge the US by it's current head flunky in charge. Bear in mind the US fell into the world power role. Before WWII we had an absolutely abysmmal military and a public that sincerly believed in isolationalism. Even then most of the public was opposed to getting involved with world affairs like WWII until Pearl Harbor was bombed. If the Soviets had pulled back from the Eastern block countries like they said would after they drove Germans out, the US would have gladly receded back into it's prewar status of isolationalism.

FDR was not particulary religious, and it was on his watch that the US became a world power. Most presidents since WWII have not been overtly religious, Reagan included. Eisenhaeur added "one nation under God" back around 1950 or so in order to distinguish us from the godless commies, and that's probably the last overtly religious act by a president since then.

W is really the first overtly religious president in quite a while. He would of course like nothing more than for the US to become a secular religious state, and has said things to that effect (I recall something about Aethiests not really being Americans).

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
#relax I'm just being a picky Perl person
#I could be Christiansen and call you a godless moron ;-)
use strict;
open(FILE, "/etc/passwd) or die $!, "\n";
while(<FILE>) {

print $_;

}
close(FILE);
exit;

Care to explain how he's "clearly infringing" anything? The phonetic similarities are incidental. In my accent, I first pronounced his domain as 'mike.rowe.soft.dot.com' whereas I pronounce Microsoft's as 'microsoft.dot.com'. The phonetic similarities wouldn't even be close enough to confuse mediocre speech recognition unless you're a mushmouth, although the tool likely wouldn't recognize the spelling for Mike's site anyway.

As for similarities in the way they're spelled, the only thing the two domains share is 'soft' and '.com'. If somebody is so abysmally stupid that they could misspell microsoft as mikerowesoft, they probably aren't smart enough to by typing on their own anyway.

This is no different than the Nissan car company abusing Uzi Nissan because of his name. Corporate abuse of power, plain and simple. Am I jumping to conclusions? You betcha. But, maybe before somebody flames me for it, they ought to stop and consider why I'd automatically assume that a big corporate would be abusing it's power in this situation. I don't suppose I've come to expect that from these companies based on their past actions, right? Noooooo.... they're just good little capitalists struggling to earn a living like the rest of us. They would NEVER play the courts or stomp helpless individuals over make-believe issues like this. Uh uh. Obviously, Mr. Rowe is a bad, horrible, stinking, dirty, godless commie and Microsoft is doing its Patriotic Duty (TM) in stomping the shit out of him.

OK... that sarcasm seemed to cross into something else entirely...

With Linux emerging as the platform of choice for scientific applications, I would imagine NASA has had to have changed this policy, so I would like to hear from some NASA people what the current policies are.

One thing is clear, open source is being demonized by people with vested interests, and are trying to pass actual laws along the lines of "This is Godless and Communistic." I personally think open source is a really good fit for OS and language design. These are foundations on which everything else rests. Without open source you don't know if what you are building lies over a fault line or an artisian well.

I'm sure Microsoft is cutting deals behind closed doors with various governments about putting in code to "track the bad guys". It's not just a matter of having stuff in there you don't know about, but having it steal your processor cycles, and having unintended interactions. And since it's black box and probably DRM, it will probably become illegal to deactivate it. And since you can't rip it out, or should even know it's in there, someone comes along with a real killer virus exploit that turns on your own DRM against you.

I tried to go to the monk's website, and this is what I got:
Access to this server is forbidden from your client
I'm using mozilla on knoppix. What's the deal?

scifiber_phil,

got news for you. those terrorists have a stronger faith in god than you(their version of it anyway), and look what happened to their society.

if you want to know what America would be like with a theocracy, just look at any muslim governed nation.

i am so sick of you self-righteous bastards moralizing about how if the rest of the world thought like you, we'd have no more problems. well, look at what happens in a world where everyone IS forced to follow the same moral code.

YOU'RE MAKING MY BONER GO AWAY

Don't use so many goddamn caps you godless shitstain.

Damn Godless commie martians!

And just when, in the last 2 millenia or so, has it ever been "acceptable" to be, say, a Christian?

One of the main reasons why people left Europe to travel to the New World was to escape religious persecution: if you weren't a Christian, or if you were the wrong type of Christian, then you were a social pariah in most of Europe from the medieval period until today.

Indeed, Christianity was such a dominant force in Europe that exporting it to other lands by force was seen as good and righteous. Or haven't you heard of the Crusades?

Furthermore, until recently, being a non-Christian was the biggest social stigma possible in most of the western world. Getting an education was impossible to non-Christians as universities only practiced religious persecution.

Virtually any educational institute that you care to name that's over a hundred years old will have been founded by one religious order or another, and the names of many universities and colleges gives this away (eg, Notre Dame, Brigham Young University et al in the US; various Oxford and Cambridge colleges called Jesus or Christ, Magdalen, St Andrews University, et al in the UK). In fact, when University College London was established in 1826, it became the first university to accept people regardless of their class, race, religion or gender. Such a liberal attitude towards religion had others deriding UCL as "the Godless of Gower Street".

To say that being Christian has never been acceptable in the last two millennia is laughable, especially when it's the exact opposite of the truth: not being a Christian has only just become acceptable, and even today that's not a universal truth in the so-called "free" western world.

I don't believe that saying "I'm Christian" has any on someone in most US circles. I'd guess if you took a poll, more than 60% of Slashdotters would say they are Christian. That's just a guess since most Slashdotters are Americans with computers. And most Americans of affluency (can afford computers) consider themselves Christian.

There is a big difference between saying

"I'm a Christian"

vs...

"I'm a Christian so you should be too. You should respect all my rituals and accept public funding of them while I belittle your Judaic and Islamic traditions. Your little heathen boys should have to be singled out for NOT being christian in our majority christian society."

vs...

"All you non-Christian's are heathens who are attempting to destroy American ways of life. The founding fathers were all Christian. This is a nation FOR Christians. Homosexuals and Feminists are godless infidels. The Jews killed Christ so they deserve as much."

Most "godless liberals" and "christian liberals" tend to have no problem with statement number 1. Statements number 2 and 3 are problematic because your not expressing religious freedom. Your expressing freedom to oppress others religiously.

Now wait a minute. Microsoft has repeatedly told us that the only reason they kept adding features that became obvious security holes later is because customers demand it. So the only reason they can be dropping win 98 is because nobody wants it any more. And that 27% still using it? Obvious lies! Anti-Microsoft trolling!

Please Microsoft, ignore these Godless devils and keep up the good work. I want software that is bigger, slower and prone to Blaster! Wrap that browser even tighter into the OS; fuck DOJ! Drop Win98! If they wanna run some wimpy, lean, efficient OS let them run Linux! oh, uh, errr, wait...

Here's a gun. See ya, you godless heathen communist. World's better without you.

If you don't like it, move to another state ;).

That is never an excuse for a stupid law. I might as well tell some "godless commie" to "move to cuba" because he doesn't like the fact that Ashcroft is an asshole.

Let's take a minute and clarify the most important unspoken point here::: We are not the ones who are responsible for the brutal and horrible terrorist acts. Harrassing us and our equipment isn't going to reduce anyone's chances from being victimized by these psychos.

I'm with you there. If you haven't already, check out freetotravel.org which points out these kinds of things and more.

If bozos living in caves manage to get together the resources to mount massive terrorist attacks upon the civilized world (and who believes that bozos in caves are the ones actually doing this?)

Deluded millionaire religious fundementalist bozos in caves, but still bozos in caves.

then the AID shipments and relief work will be suspended for a year. Soldiers will actually shoot the doctors who refuse to comply.

I've switched my thinking on this one. Up til a couple weeks ago, I was right there with you. Now, I believe that the goal of these people is the destruction of the west and it's replacement with a theocratic islamic state based on sharia. These people don't want our aid payments, they want us bowing to mecca, veiling our women, censoring our "godless" entertainment, and wiping out all competing religions.

my .02 euros.

I realize that my comment isn't a direct response to the parent but this looks like as good as a place as any to point out the religious aspect of this story. Lots of people have already pointed out that this guy is greedy and stupid. But there's something else at work here as well: he believes he is better than the rest of us because he is religious. The story specifically mentioned that as soon as the scammers started making references to God, that the Mark was hooked. This is very important. If there was any question in this doofus' mind as to whether this was legit, it was dispelled by this simple reference to God.

Religion is a divisive force in our society. While I do not doubt that some people have obtained some benefitted from religion, it largely serves to label people and compartmentalize our supposed "melting pot". People are identified by their religious faith in the same manner as race and sex are used. But religion is unique in that people choose their religion. This makes them feel like they really belong and that others do not. In the mind of the devoutly religious, people are divided into the "have faith/found God" camp which is considered Good and "the other godless wretches" which are considered Bad. Religion serves a "secret society" kind of role in which members, consciously or not, consider other members to be "better" than non-members.

So what does this anti-religious tirade have to do with an internet scam? Mr. Religious Scam Victim sees an opportunity to profit handsomely from a deal that he knows very little about. Why was he chosen? Why would these people trust him? Because he's religious, of course. He's a member of The Club (also known as God's Favorite Children). He has been given this opportunity because either (a) good things happen to members of The Club because they're the Good guys in the world or (b) God has selected him for this mission. The money is about to be stolen away by some evil, nonreligous foreign government and it's up to him and the Chosen Ones to make sure it stays in the hands of the faithful. Why does he deserve this money? Because he's religous, and therefore, better than most people. In his mind, it's as simple as this.

Some people have expressed anger at this guy for being stupid. Some have expressed sympathy for him. Some have laughed at his greed while others feel pity. But there's one characteristic of his psyche that has not been called out yet. He believes that he is a better human being than people without religion. If you don't want to hate him for being stupid or greedy, then I implore you to hate him for having the arrogance to believe that he is a better person that those who do not subscribe to any religion.

you sound like a godless commy