Slashdot Mirror
Ask About the Iraqi LUG
Yes, there is a Linux Users Group in Iraq. When it was first mentioned on Slashdot it only had two members. It's grown a little since then, as has The Iraqi Linux Group Portal. Adam Davidson, an American reporter in Baghdad who helped start the group, has agreed to answer your questions about Linux in Iraq. Please post only one question per comment. We'll email Adam 10 of the highest-moderated questions, and post his answers verbatim (except for HTML formatting) when he gets them back to us.
Have you cared to ever research the approximate percentage of Islamic population that engages in suicide bombing?
...") and you apparently read it because you decided to mock it, yet you didn't seem to understand it. I know that the percentage of trouble-makers (define it however you like) is much lower than the percentage of Average-Joes who just want to live their lives.
That's not the relevant statistic. The relevant statistic is how many terrorist attacks (outside of Islamic countries, where one expects a high incidence) are perpetraded by followers of Islam?
I addressed this point ("There are many more innocent
I guess all people of the Islamic faith wear turbans... Oh boy! Why do I even bother.
Gotcha, so I need to write a graduate-level thesis on comparative middle-eastern religions in order to use a quick example? I know that not all Muslims wear turbans, and not all turban wearers are Muslim. Sheesh, it's like saying that someone is a kilt is likely to be a Scot, despite the Irish wearing kilts, and a million other minor issues.
You know, I've being watching the evening news lately and noticed a large percentage of the crime stories involve people of African decent. Maybe our police should target suspicious African Americans because of some statistic.
That's a loaded example, but if done without malice, is reasonable. If a black man robbed a bank it makes sense to watch black men, not white. If men commit more rape than women it makes sense to be suspicious of men in bushes by dark pathways at night, but it doesn't mean they're guilty.
The black example is particularly bad because there are many racists who hate blacks and will take any chance to hurt them, and because the skin color isn't the correlating factor, it's usually poverty which correlates to violent crime. If the poor are largely black in your town this may mean that blacks (in situations likely to involve violent crime) would attract more attention.
It's only a problem when you go overboard.
If there was a serial killer in your neighborhood, would you not be suspicious of anyone matching his description, despite that fact that short blonde men (for instance) aren't all serial killers? How is this different than other physical signs? Is it wrong to notice skin color and gender but not hair color or height?
Nice rant about Israel too, though you must be a bit obsessed to try to bring it into unrelated conversations.