Fedora's dual-monitor setup is even easier...you don't have to press an awful keystroke combination like "Windows-P". Besides, the OP isn't asking how to set up dual-monitor. He's asking how to set up a separate workspace on each monitor, something that should not be out of reach with X's new multi-input functionality, something I've not heard of in the Windows or Mac world. BTW, I'm using an Intel IGP, not an nvidia card. It might not work great on an ATI card, but...well...it might if ATI had anywhere near decent linux support.
My computer didn't come with a sticker that said "Microsoft Office Enabled", then ask me to pay to use Office after 60 days...oh wait! Yes, it did! Good point, although some of us consumers will always feel like these sorts of things are deceptive.
Yeah...I was really surprised when I got my wife a gps-enabled smartphone, then found out it doesn't work unless you pay...Shouldn't you not have to pay to use the hardware that you already purchased? Maybe their justification is you pay for the maps, but overall it really seems ridiculous.
Again, I think the fact that charitable giving has gone down so little over the past two years, compared with the downturn in tax revenue makes charitable giving MORE reliable than tax-funded charity.
My main justification for trusting people to give is that they already do. Would they give as much as the government currently takes? Probably not, to be fair. But I do believe the money would be used more efficiently, hopefully making up.
I know it's cliche to bash government inefficiency...but that's only because government efficiency has been so bad for so long. Private business has always been more efficient than government, which is why I'm for a freer market AND more private charity.
From a pragmatic standpoint, I think that there are valid arguments (although, I believe, not enough) for government-provided healthcare. From a philosophical standpoint, however, I see zero justification for expanding the government in any way. Anyone remember the parable of the snake and the mongoose?
Are you kidding me? Bing is disgustingly ugly to look at. Google's minimalist design is what keeps me there. The only reason Bing has anything cool to speak of is because it grabs results from wolfram alpha. Besides that, do you really see Google's withdrawal from the Chinese market as a bad thing? If I were trying to run a business in a place where the government is subversive toward US companies (not too far off from California, incidentally), I'd probably leave based on principle as well. Still, I do agree that the poster is dead wrong in casting this as apple v. google. It really is bing v. google; unfortunately, I'm afraid apple is tying themselves to a sinking ship if they go through with this. Wasn't it reported somewhere that bing users are three times as likely as google users to click a paid ad? Says something about why bing's marketshare has grown: it sucks in people who believe ads about bing. That's my theory, anyway.
I don't mean to shrug off quality of life. I think it's very important. I do not believe there is any constitutional protection for someone's quality of life: "life, liberty, and the _pursuit_ of happiness". However, I do believe that we have a moral (not civic) duty to help those in need. So, I'm against public health care on the same grounds that I'm against government ownership of GM - that stuff isn't the government's job.
Actually, charitable giving has gone down due to the economic crisis, but probably not as much as you think: link. I believe it would go up if the government would tax us less...but then again maybe I'm being to optimistic to think people would act humanely without government coercion.
You talk like health care is a never-ending resource. I saw John Q, and I felt terrible, but isn't it true that there are more people in need of a heart transplant than there are hearts available? I would much rather have a private charity or even an HMO and hospital board deciding whether I deserve to be on the list, than a government-run board. We don't have to use vitriolic terms like "death panel", but the truth is that health care is "scarce" in the economic sense. Check out this article: link.
I have no problem with giving health care to people who need it, or with helping people who can't afford it. I just think the government will do just as bad a job with this as they have with so many other services, and the people who need to be helped won't really be helped in the long run. You say private charity is unreliable, but I saw too many people turn to the Salvation Army when OSHA and the Red Cross (I know, RC is not exactly government, but they're much more tied in) were turning people away after Katrina (I was living in Missouri at the time) to agree with you.
Check out this article on politifact: here. It doesn't dispute that people's quality of life suffers due to lack of healthcare, but it does dispute some misinformation regarding actual earlier deaths.
Personally, I'm not against poor people like myself having healthcare. If they can't get it through their employer, I would rather see private charity step in than the government, but unfortunately we do live in a country where the government has largely taken the place of private charity. What must be, must be.
I'm NOT trying to make it sound like I know what I'm talking about, because the following is entirely conjecture, with barely any thought behind it: I think everyone takes it for granted that urban areas are more likely to be blue than red (politically). Do various environmental factors also lead them to have higher cancer rates? I've not verified that, but I did just think it would be interesting to discover that the two maps aren't mere coincidence.
Sodom and Gomorrah is, I suppose, the passage of choice for those who want to convince you that God is about to fry you for disobedience of His law, but it's by far not the only place in the Bible that addresses homosexual behavior. Read it with an open mind, and I believe it's obvious (although by no means a major theme) that homosexual behavior is outside of God's will (and therefore sin - missing the mark).
But, like I mentioned, homosexuality is not a major theme of scripture. The Bible has WAY more to say against adultery than against homosexuality as such. I think that one of the major failures of modern Christianity is the attempt to place sins in tiers, something the Bible doesn't do. As far as your standing with God goes, if you never committed any sin but telling a white lie, you would have fallen short, and thus deserved Hell. If you committed atrocities that would make Hitler, Stalin and Mao seem like boy scouts, you would have fallen short, and thus deserved Hell. Either way, the point of the Bible (and Christianity) is that Jesus' death on the cross squared up your accounts, and you now benefit from Jesus Christ living up to God's will. If you have faith in Him, it doesn't matter whether you're an occasional liar, a murderer, a thief, an adulterer (or someone who lusts in your heart), or a homosexual, or all of the above - you now have a good standing before God.
Homosexuality is, according to the Bible, a sin, but no worse of a sin than any other. Too many Christians have let their personal distaste for homosexuality prevent them from seeing homosexuals the way God does - as His wonderful creations who need a healthy relationship with Him.
On a non-theological front, I do believe that different wrongdoings should be in tiers. Murder is WAY worse than lying, and genocide is probably worse than a single murder. On this scale, I would not label homosexuality as any sort of wrongdoing, nor would I say it's wrong to be a furry or etcetera.
P.S. I don't even think you have to quit homosexuality to become a Christian...I just think it's highly likely you'll want to afterward. Also, don't get me started on how silly I think it is for people to try and promote Christianity through political means.
The reason it's so important for net neutrality laws to prevent ISP's from filtering or throttling traffic is because they have such a stranglehold on the market, and that monopoly/cartel is mostly government-protected. There's no way to bypass your ISP except via proxy or by switching ISP's, and many people have neither the technical knowledge to do the first, nor the availability of the second option. If you don't like the way a particular search engine behaves, just don't use a search engine, or switch to another. Telecoms are almost as impervious to market swings as the government itself, whereas there are new search engines popping up every day. Take cuil for instance. Besides, how are they going to regulate different types of search engines, for instance Bing vs. Google vs. Wolfram Alpha. Each of these engines has a very different idea of what is "relevant", even if you strip away any manipulation done for ulterior motives.
Aha. I understand your point. I do believe that, given the chance, society would rise to the occasion and help those in need. I believe that private charity is and always has been more efficient than government...dmv blah blah blah...and I do believe that people would give more if the government got its hands out of their pockets. I give on top of what the government forces me to give, but maybe I am just a bit too optimistic about the human race.
Would it be fair of me to make the extrapolation that your concerns are practical more than philosophical?
I think he's trying to echo the truism (read: not a command) found in Proverbs 6:30-31:
Men do not despise a thief if he steals
To satisfy himself when he is hungry;
But when he is found, he must repay sevenfold;
He must give all the substance of his house.
As someone who embraces liberty religiously (by being a Christian) as well as politically (by leaning hard toward Libertarianism) and philosophically (by being both), I don't condemn the necessities thief either, although in my experience people steal alcohol and electronics far more than they do bread. I do believe, however, that it would be far better if caring individuals were to meet the needs of these people, as already happens through rescue missions, etc., rather than the person resorting to theft, which in all likelihood will only further degenerate his situation.
My Roosevelt trumps your Reagan.:P Also, next time you want to project stupid ideas onto me, please preface it by asking my permission, which I most certainly would not grant. I do believe in social responsibility. I just believe it should be mandated by society, not government. And if you have to ask, "What's the difference?", I'm just wasting my time.
The problem with your idea is that it is based on a foundation of personal responsibility. That hasn't been much of a factor is American life since the New Deal.
How the heck would you black out wi-fi for the driver? Cone of silence, engage! Besides, when I use my laptop while driving, I sit it on the passenger seat anyway.:P Also, the same people who would be guilty of "distracted driving" with wi-fi are the ones who do it with their phone. Take away their phone, they'll read a book (I've seen this). Take away the book, they'll get so engrossed in talking with their passenger, they don't pay attention. The best method of protecting other drivers is to get people to pay more attention to driving than anything else, not take away everything else. There'll always be some distraction you can't take away.
Argh. Think about it. Users can edit some things inside/etc/ (shadow, for instance - every time the user changes his/her password). Users can edit things inside of/var/ (/var/spool/cron/$USER comes to mind). There is a longstanding tradition in *nix of giving users the ability to make changes outside of their home directory where it makes sense. That's the whole point of setuid. So quit debating whether this breaks some sort of unspoken rule, and give some real reasons why it doesn't make sense to provide the access. From a desktop standpoint (Fedora is a desktop OS, not an enterprise one), it makes perfect sense to allow a user to install software that's already been verified as clean of malware without having to escalate their privileges. I don't see how this makes any more of a security risk than allowing a user's gnome session to automount and even autorun their usb stick. And besides, if you don't like it, it's superd00per easy to disable. If you can't figure out how to disable it, you probably should be administering a server with anything remotely important on it.
Wow. That was ignorant. I use sudo on my fedora box all the time. You really should look things like that up before assuming fedora doesn't have a feature. Also, if you read the bugzilla you'll see VERY clearly that it's superd00per easy to disable the default feature.
And for crying out loud, giving users access to install a package is a lot more desirable than giving them full access to do anything with sudo. Sure, you can lock sudo down pretty easily too, but honestly, do you?
Either way, if you're an admin who's worth half his salt, you'll make it exactly the way you want, and screw the defaults.
Lastly, under the defaults with selinux targeted running, along with the fact that practically no network-accessible services run as root, you'd be hard-pressed to gain root access through any of those services you mentioned.
Unfortunately, I think this is a classic case of correlation being mistaken for causation. The post itself says the reason they're better parents is that they don't have kids by accident. In other words, the real lesson here is that parents who want their kids make better parents. Gasp!
Although I oppose government-defined same-sex marriage, I can't complain about same-sex couples adopting. If singles can adopt, same-sex couples should be able to as well. I may not agree with their morality, but then again, I don't agree with most peoples' morality, and they still get to adopt.
Aha! You caught me! Having never thought to research the plural form of "virus", I was not aware that the establishment says it is "viruses". In my defense, the incorrect plural I used, "virii", has come to refer to malware in general, at least according to some of the references I found. Nevertheless, I must concede that my assumption was based on ignorance more than knowledge. English is indeed a nuanced, bastardized language!
Avoiding virii: Don't download illegally; don't look at porn; don't double-click "cutesquirrels.exe" that somebody emailed to you. Ta-da!
Seriously, though, I've been running Fedora Linux on my parents' computer for about 6 months now (they have my 12-year-old nephew, 14-year-old niece, and my 32-year-old brother [the kids' other uncle] living with them, all using that one computer). It's 1.1 Ghz, 512M of RAM, and it works WAY better now than it did when it was running XP (i.e. I have to drive over less often, and when I do it's just to visit). Plus, I've been able to implement internet content filtering that protects the kids and my parents, but is far more lenient on my brother. My nephew has been able to install Windows games in Linux using WINE just by double-clicking and clicking next-next-next (i.e. he has no idea it's not Windows), albeit the hardware will only do so much. When I talk them into finally getting a faster computer, I'll probably just throw Fedora on that one for them, too, as it's really eased my support burden. Plus, with a little help from tools like hamachi, remobo or go6.net, I can get ssh access and fix the few things that do come up remotely.
Great points, flyneye. Personally, I do believe in literal creation as described in Genesis, but if evolution were proved true beyond doubt (it has a long way to go), it wouldn't do anything to disprove God. As you pointed out, there are plenty (I'd say they're a strong minority) of people who believe in evolution guided by a Creator. Also, as someone pointed out earlier, disproving evolution doesn't do much in itself to help the Christian cause. I really appreciate the writings of C.S. Lewis, in which he doesn't outright argue with Darwinism, but does point out the arrogance, naivete and close-mindedness of scientists and others who act like evolution is a proven, done deal. For my part, I don't necessarily want you guys to quit believing in evolution, I just want you to have the intellectual integrity to admit that you don't know EVERYthing, and stop being such bigots toward anyone who bucks the establishment and thinks there may be another option. We're not stupid, just as you aren't stupid: we just interpret the data differently.
And to any other Christians, for Pete's sake, you know nobody's going to be brought into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ because you prove them wrong. Sure, let the big boys argue with Richard Dawkins (if they can get him to agree to it), but quit trying to use creation/evolution debates as an in to tell people about Jesus. "Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe."
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Fedora's dual-monitor setup is even easier...you don't have to press an awful keystroke combination like "Windows-P". Besides, the OP isn't asking how to set up dual-monitor. He's asking how to set up a separate workspace on each monitor, something that should not be out of reach with X's new multi-input functionality, something I've not heard of in the Windows or Mac world. BTW, I'm using an Intel IGP, not an nvidia card. It might not work great on an ATI card, but...well...it might if ATI had anywhere near decent linux support.
My computer didn't come with a sticker that said "Microsoft Office Enabled", then ask me to pay to use Office after 60 days...oh wait! Yes, it did! Good point, although some of us consumers will always feel like these sorts of things are deceptive.
Yeah...I was really surprised when I got my wife a gps-enabled smartphone, then found out it doesn't work unless you pay...Shouldn't you not have to pay to use the hardware that you already purchased? Maybe their justification is you pay for the maps, but overall it really seems ridiculous.
Again, I think the fact that charitable giving has gone down so little over the past two years, compared with the downturn in tax revenue makes charitable giving MORE reliable than tax-funded charity.
My main justification for trusting people to give is that they already do. Would they give as much as the government currently takes? Probably not, to be fair. But I do believe the money would be used more efficiently, hopefully making up.
I know it's cliche to bash government inefficiency...but that's only because government efficiency has been so bad for so long. Private business has always been more efficient than government, which is why I'm for a freer market AND more private charity.
From a pragmatic standpoint, I think that there are valid arguments (although, I believe, not enough) for government-provided healthcare. From a philosophical standpoint, however, I see zero justification for expanding the government in any way. Anyone remember the parable of the snake and the mongoose?
Are you kidding me? Bing is disgustingly ugly to look at. Google's minimalist design is what keeps me there. The only reason Bing has anything cool to speak of is because it grabs results from wolfram alpha. Besides that, do you really see Google's withdrawal from the Chinese market as a bad thing? If I were trying to run a business in a place where the government is subversive toward US companies (not too far off from California, incidentally), I'd probably leave based on principle as well. Still, I do agree that the poster is dead wrong in casting this as apple v. google. It really is bing v. google; unfortunately, I'm afraid apple is tying themselves to a sinking ship if they go through with this. Wasn't it reported somewhere that bing users are three times as likely as google users to click a paid ad? Says something about why bing's marketshare has grown: it sucks in people who believe ads about bing. That's my theory, anyway.
Whoever wrote that is obviously an apple fanboi.
I don't mean to shrug off quality of life. I think it's very important. I do not believe there is any constitutional protection for someone's quality of life: "life, liberty, and the _pursuit_ of happiness". However, I do believe that we have a moral (not civic) duty to help those in need. So, I'm against public health care on the same grounds that I'm against government ownership of GM - that stuff isn't the government's job.
Actually, charitable giving has gone down due to the economic crisis, but probably not as much as you think: link. I believe it would go up if the government would tax us less...but then again maybe I'm being to optimistic to think people would act humanely without government coercion.
You talk like health care is a never-ending resource. I saw John Q, and I felt terrible, but isn't it true that there are more people in need of a heart transplant than there are hearts available? I would much rather have a private charity or even an HMO and hospital board deciding whether I deserve to be on the list, than a government-run board. We don't have to use vitriolic terms like "death panel", but the truth is that health care is "scarce" in the economic sense. Check out this article: link.
I have no problem with giving health care to people who need it, or with helping people who can't afford it. I just think the government will do just as bad a job with this as they have with so many other services, and the people who need to be helped won't really be helped in the long run. You say private charity is unreliable, but I saw too many people turn to the Salvation Army when OSHA and the Red Cross (I know, RC is not exactly government, but they're much more tied in) were turning people away after Katrina (I was living in Missouri at the time) to agree with you.
Check out this article on politifact: here. It doesn't dispute that people's quality of life suffers due to lack of healthcare, but it does dispute some misinformation regarding actual earlier deaths.
Personally, I'm not against poor people like myself having healthcare. If they can't get it through their employer, I would rather see private charity step in than the government, but unfortunately we do live in a country where the government has largely taken the place of private charity. What must be, must be.
I'm NOT trying to make it sound like I know what I'm talking about, because the following is entirely conjecture, with barely any thought behind it: I think everyone takes it for granted that urban areas are more likely to be blue than red (politically). Do various environmental factors also lead them to have higher cancer rates? I've not verified that, but I did just think it would be interesting to discover that the two maps aren't mere coincidence.
Sodom and Gomorrah is, I suppose, the passage of choice for those who want to convince you that God is about to fry you for disobedience of His law, but it's by far not the only place in the Bible that addresses homosexual behavior. Read it with an open mind, and I believe it's obvious (although by no means a major theme) that homosexual behavior is outside of God's will (and therefore sin - missing the mark).
But, like I mentioned, homosexuality is not a major theme of scripture. The Bible has WAY more to say against adultery than against homosexuality as such. I think that one of the major failures of modern Christianity is the attempt to place sins in tiers, something the Bible doesn't do. As far as your standing with God goes, if you never committed any sin but telling a white lie, you would have fallen short, and thus deserved Hell. If you committed atrocities that would make Hitler, Stalin and Mao seem like boy scouts, you would have fallen short, and thus deserved Hell. Either way, the point of the Bible (and Christianity) is that Jesus' death on the cross squared up your accounts, and you now benefit from Jesus Christ living up to God's will. If you have faith in Him, it doesn't matter whether you're an occasional liar, a murderer, a thief, an adulterer (or someone who lusts in your heart), or a homosexual, or all of the above - you now have a good standing before God.
Homosexuality is, according to the Bible, a sin, but no worse of a sin than any other. Too many Christians have let their personal distaste for homosexuality prevent them from seeing homosexuals the way God does - as His wonderful creations who need a healthy relationship with Him.
On a non-theological front, I do believe that different wrongdoings should be in tiers. Murder is WAY worse than lying, and genocide is probably worse than a single murder. On this scale, I would not label homosexuality as any sort of wrongdoing, nor would I say it's wrong to be a furry or etcetera.
P.S. I don't even think you have to quit homosexuality to become a Christian...I just think it's highly likely you'll want to afterward. Also, don't get me started on how silly I think it is for people to try and promote Christianity through political means.
The reason it's so important for net neutrality laws to prevent ISP's from filtering or throttling traffic is because they have such a stranglehold on the market, and that monopoly/cartel is mostly government-protected. There's no way to bypass your ISP except via proxy or by switching ISP's, and many people have neither the technical knowledge to do the first, nor the availability of the second option. If you don't like the way a particular search engine behaves, just don't use a search engine, or switch to another. Telecoms are almost as impervious to market swings as the government itself, whereas there are new search engines popping up every day. Take cuil for instance. Besides, how are they going to regulate different types of search engines, for instance Bing vs. Google vs. Wolfram Alpha. Each of these engines has a very different idea of what is "relevant", even if you strip away any manipulation done for ulterior motives.
Aha. I understand your point. I do believe that, given the chance, society would rise to the occasion and help those in need. I believe that private charity is and always has been more efficient than government...dmv blah blah blah...and I do believe that people would give more if the government got its hands out of their pockets. I give on top of what the government forces me to give, but maybe I am just a bit too optimistic about the human race. Would it be fair of me to make the extrapolation that your concerns are practical more than philosophical?
I think he's trying to echo the truism (read: not a command) found in Proverbs 6:30-31:
Men do not despise a thief if he steals
To satisfy himself when he is hungry;
But when he is found, he must repay sevenfold;
He must give all the substance of his house.
As someone who embraces liberty religiously (by being a Christian) as well as politically (by leaning hard toward Libertarianism) and philosophically (by being both), I don't condemn the necessities thief either, although in my experience people steal alcohol and electronics far more than they do bread. I do believe, however, that it would be far better if caring individuals were to meet the needs of these people, as already happens through rescue missions, etc., rather than the person resorting to theft, which in all likelihood will only further degenerate his situation.
My Roosevelt trumps your Reagan. :P Also, next time you want to project stupid ideas onto me, please preface it by asking my permission, which I most certainly would not grant. I do believe in social responsibility. I just believe it should be mandated by society, not government. And if you have to ask, "What's the difference?", I'm just wasting my time.
The problem with your idea is that it is based on a foundation of personal responsibility. That hasn't been much of a factor is American life since the New Deal.
Mayhaps "set" would have been a better choice than "sit".
How the heck would you black out wi-fi for the driver? Cone of silence, engage! Besides, when I use my laptop while driving, I sit it on the passenger seat anyway. :P Also, the same people who would be guilty of "distracted driving" with wi-fi are the ones who do it with their phone. Take away their phone, they'll read a book (I've seen this). Take away the book, they'll get so engrossed in talking with their passenger, they don't pay attention. The best method of protecting other drivers is to get people to pay more attention to driving than anything else, not take away everything else. There'll always be some distraction you can't take away.
Argh. Think about it. Users can edit some things inside /etc/ (shadow, for instance - every time the user changes his/her password). Users can edit things inside of /var/ (/var/spool/cron/$USER comes to mind). There is a longstanding tradition in *nix of giving users the ability to make changes outside of their home directory where it makes sense. That's the whole point of setuid. So quit debating whether this breaks some sort of unspoken rule, and give some real reasons why it doesn't make sense to provide the access. From a desktop standpoint (Fedora is a desktop OS, not an enterprise one), it makes perfect sense to allow a user to install software that's already been verified as clean of malware without having to escalate their privileges. I don't see how this makes any more of a security risk than allowing a user's gnome session to automount and even autorun their usb stick. And besides, if you don't like it, it's superd00per easy to disable. If you can't figure out how to disable it, you probably should be administering a server with anything remotely important on it.
Wow. That was ignorant. I use sudo on my fedora box all the time. You really should look things like that up before assuming fedora doesn't have a feature. Also, if you read the bugzilla you'll see VERY clearly that it's superd00per easy to disable the default feature.
And for crying out loud, giving users access to install a package is a lot more desirable than giving them full access to do anything with sudo. Sure, you can lock sudo down pretty easily too, but honestly, do you?
Either way, if you're an admin who's worth half his salt, you'll make it exactly the way you want, and screw the defaults.
Lastly, under the defaults with selinux targeted running, along with the fact that practically no network-accessible services run as root, you'd be hard-pressed to gain root access through any of those services you mentioned.
Way to go, modding up a bunch of FUD.
Unfortunately, I think this is a classic case of correlation being mistaken for causation. The post itself says the reason they're better parents is that they don't have kids by accident. In other words, the real lesson here is that parents who want their kids make better parents. Gasp!
Although I oppose government-defined same-sex marriage, I can't complain about same-sex couples adopting. If singles can adopt, same-sex couples should be able to as well. I may not agree with their morality, but then again, I don't agree with most peoples' morality, and they still get to adopt.
Aha! You caught me! Having never thought to research the plural form of "virus", I was not aware that the establishment says it is "viruses". In my defense, the incorrect plural I used, "virii", has come to refer to malware in general, at least according to some of the references I found. Nevertheless, I must concede that my assumption was based on ignorance more than knowledge. English is indeed a nuanced, bastardized language!
$( ) and back-ticks does the same thing
That's mostly, but not exactly true. The Bash Guide for Beginners explains the minute difference in section 3.4.5 (link).
for POST in $(cat slashdot); do
beGrammarNazi $POST
done
I couldn't resist.
Avoiding virii: Don't download illegally; don't look at porn; don't double-click "cutesquirrels.exe" that somebody emailed to you. Ta-da! Seriously, though, I've been running Fedora Linux on my parents' computer for about 6 months now (they have my 12-year-old nephew, 14-year-old niece, and my 32-year-old brother [the kids' other uncle] living with them, all using that one computer). It's 1.1 Ghz, 512M of RAM, and it works WAY better now than it did when it was running XP (i.e. I have to drive over less often, and when I do it's just to visit). Plus, I've been able to implement internet content filtering that protects the kids and my parents, but is far more lenient on my brother. My nephew has been able to install Windows games in Linux using WINE just by double-clicking and clicking next-next-next (i.e. he has no idea it's not Windows), albeit the hardware will only do so much. When I talk them into finally getting a faster computer, I'll probably just throw Fedora on that one for them, too, as it's really eased my support burden. Plus, with a little help from tools like hamachi, remobo or go6.net, I can get ssh access and fix the few things that do come up remotely.
Great points, flyneye. Personally, I do believe in literal creation as described in Genesis, but if evolution were proved true beyond doubt (it has a long way to go), it wouldn't do anything to disprove God. As you pointed out, there are plenty (I'd say they're a strong minority) of people who believe in evolution guided by a Creator. Also, as someone pointed out earlier, disproving evolution doesn't do much in itself to help the Christian cause. I really appreciate the writings of C.S. Lewis, in which he doesn't outright argue with Darwinism, but does point out the arrogance, naivete and close-mindedness of scientists and others who act like evolution is a proven, done deal. For my part, I don't necessarily want you guys to quit believing in evolution, I just want you to have the intellectual integrity to admit that you don't know EVERYthing, and stop being such bigots toward anyone who bucks the establishment and thinks there may be another option. We're not stupid, just as you aren't stupid: we just interpret the data differently.
And to any other Christians, for Pete's sake, you know nobody's going to be brought into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ because you prove them wrong. Sure, let the big boys argue with Richard Dawkins (if they can get him to agree to it), but quit trying to use creation/evolution debates as an in to tell people about Jesus. "Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet believe."