It also works in reverse, why don't the Palestinians negotiate for a settlement (and the answer I already gave: the Qur'an and hadiths command they commit genocide, but I guess you have a poor or no understanding of Islamic scripture, which is why you point the finger of blame in the wrong direction). In 1948 the UN offered two states, Israel accepted and the Arabs refused (believing their genocidal plan would be successful). The Israelis were prepared to negotiate, and have been prepared ever since to negotiate provided there are *no preconditions* (otherwise, what is the point of negotiating, yeah?).
Complete ill informed nonsense. The official Palestinian position is that they will negotiate on two fairly innocuous conditions. 1) That Israel ceases the construction of illegal settlements on its land. 2) That the starting point for negotiations for a two state solution be based on the pre-1967 borders. The latter point was accepted by the United Nations in Resolution 58/292 (Israel and the United States were the only two major nations to vote against it, joined by four small island nations). The former point is accepted by all (including the United States).
Israel refusing to freeze settlement building is a deliberate way of keeping negotiations off the table- Israel knows that there is no way any Palestinian group can negotiate with them under those circumstances, and that's the way the Israeli hard-right like it. And the 1967 border issue is considered by the international community to be a key component to making a viable Palestinian state- Israel refusing to consider it is the same as refusing to accept the possibility of a viable outcome of negotiations. The equivalent of haggling to buy a Ferrari and knowing that you're not willing to pay above $1000- it's entering the negotiations in bad faith.
Many people on the Palestinian side like to throw bile and rhetoric around (and plenty more are willing to throw bombs); but unless something viable is offered to the Palestinian moderates, then there can be no good solution.
It raises an interesting point on the concept of supply and demand. Historically, machinists have been quite low paid, as it was a blue collar profession with a large number of skilled practitioners. I'd be willing to bet that historically the skilled machinists working for your lab were paid less than the physicists. However now machining is not considered a desirable profession, and for low pay will not attract many new trainees.
So as the supply of machinists dries up, so too will their value. You might reach a point where the machinist is considered a highly valuable employee who needs to be paid a lot of money to retain. That might be the only way to attract people into it as a career.
One day, the machinists in your lab might be the best paid people in there!
You are looking at this from a very Americo-centric point of view (understandably so, considering this is an American company producing that quintessentially American item, the gun). But this perhaps has far greater implications for countries with tighter gun control, such as my native UK.
Here, there are almost no guns. A few licensed shotguns and whatnot, but practically nothing that would be really useful for violent purposes (such as a concealable handgun or semi-automatic rifles). Contrary to what the NRA would tell you, practically no criminals have guns either- shooting crimes are extremely rare (a gun fight is almost always national news). So if you get mugged in the street, it's most likely to be by someone wielding a Swiss Army Knife or a piece of old pipe, if indeed anything more than a rough demeanour and a good bit of intimidation. I know a number of people who have been "mugged" and have managed to see off their attacker with a firm "fuck off" and a well placed shove.
What happens to this system if the criminals can manufacture, cheaply, their own handguns? Suddenly the NRA's nonsense about criminals being the only ones with guns stops being nonsense. That's a big deal.
Counter point- neonicotinoids almost certainly affect all pollinators. Bees are the poster child as in reality they are by far the biggest modern pollinators. If we hadn't already killed most if the butterflies, they would be suffering from this just as badly.
If someone shoots one of my toes off, I'd be quite cross. Quite cross indeed. I don't want to sustain a permanent injury just because your friend likes walking around "gangsta style". Or thinks that one extra round in a concealed handgun is really going to be the difference between life and death for him at some point. If firing 6 rounds at an assailant isn't enough to save you, odds are the 7th won't either...
Call me the last of the dying paranoids, if you like, but I do not want to have my computer save my password for a programme which can access my money. Particularly not on a Windows partition.
I had that problem earlier this week.My broadband went down (as it is prone to every once in a while when there's heavy weather); switched on my desktop to play a game, Steam wouldn't get past the password screen. So I closed Steam (this was on my Windows 7 boot), and booted into Linux to play some non-Steam games (FTL: Faster Than Light, since you ask).
It's the reason I quit using Steam years ago, and it still doesn't seem to have gotten better. I've only reinstalled Steam now it has a Linux client as it's the easiest way for me to install the Linux version of a few Windows games I own (specifically- I wanted to install the Linux version of Darwinia). If I could avoid Steam and stick with Ubuntu Software Centre, GOG.com and Gamers Gate, without missing out on some of the best Linux gaming, then I probably would.
They were novelty (i.e., joke) golfball detectors. They do nothing. They are a moulded plastic shell with an extendible radio aerial stuck on the front. And a sticker on the side. There is no power source, no wiring, no circuitry- nothing. The only thing in the device which even remotely resembles electronics was in the "programme cards" which McCormick distributed with them (which didn't come with the original novelty toy), which contained an RFID tag similar to the ones high-street shops use to prevent shoplifting.
Bribes. Lots and lots of bribes. It isn't clear exactly how much was paid in bribes around the world as part of this scam, but as an example General al-Jabiri of Iraq was convicted of accepting "millions of dollars" in bribes in exchange for making his country's purchases.
This also explains why the authorities in some countries (e.g. Kenya, from TFA) are still swearing blind that they are authentic, and have been doing so since the scam was publicly denounced in 2010- the people responsible are still in power, and if they admit that they faked tests and due diligence, they're going to be in an awful lot of trouble. Far easier to claim that they worked under test conditions (maybe by magic!) than admit that you never tested them.
Fair enough. I was basing this off of a conversation I had a week or two ago with a Microsoft Consultant (from the Office side of things). He was talking about how Office 365 is (according to him) moving to rolling releases rather than formal year-based releases, and that (he thought) Windows was moving in the same direction with Blue. But that wasn't his specialist subject, and nor was it a particularly in-depth conversation, so I wouldn't read too much into it as insider knowledge. I may have even misunderstood.
If only we could establish some sort of formal, coordinated system for extracting money out of people, proportional to their earnings, to pay for local infrastructure projects. Think, boy, think!
Did you use any of the early versions? They needed to make a lot of fixes, and fast!
Actually, I did just look this up- this is already the 5th version of Ubuntu to ship with Unity, so even progressing at just one version number at each release, this would still be up to 5. That makes me feel like time is moving too fast, and I want to get off.
That is taking a very strict view of "right wing" and a very liberal view of "left wing". It is generally accepted that fascism falls on the right of the left/right spectrum, if anywhere. Fascism commonly uses "socialist" as a phrase to describe itself, due to it's focus on syndicalism and/or corporatism, and it's focus on "strength in unity" nationalism. It is also generally considered anti-capitalist. The use of the phrase "socialist" by fascists is generally considered to be almost completely unrelated, in a philosophical sense, to the common usage of "socialism" to refer to the ideology derived from or related to Marxism. To quote Brunn himself:
WESTERN SOCIALISM, unlike Marxism/Communism and Capitalism, emanates not from Reason alone but from the ETHOS OF THE WEST. It expresses the instinctive and Intuitive feelings UNIQUE to the Aryan Nation. Its Idea is the Musketeers' cry: “One for All and All for One!” The ingathering of the White Nation-States into ONE CULTURAL ORGANISM — its own territory and its own State in which to house, protect, and nurture the Nation — precludes Marxist inspired class warfare and hate-struggles between its component parts. The ECONOMY springs from the CULTURE. MONEY becomes merely a tool, a means of exchange, a storage of value — not an ILLUMINATI weapon.”
So that would be the anti-Marx, corporatist use of the term "socialism" usually attributed to fascism. Mixed with a good dose of the crazies.
Contrary to the common view, left/right is not synonymous with socialism/capitalism. "Left wing" is a term that is generally taken to include socialism, communism, social anarchism, anarcho-syndaclism, and the green movement- which are all pretty much mutually exclusive and not directly related to each other. "Right wing" at the very least includes free market capitalism, fascism, theocracy and monarchism- again, generally mutually exclusive, nor directly related.
I'm sorry, but that just isn't true. If you earn $200,000 a year, you are not average.
The average household income in the US is $41,994 (according to Wikipedia, 1999). The average household income in Los Angeles (according to city-data.com, 2009) is $48,617. Average in New York City is $50,033. So if your household earns $200,000, you earn the same as four average families in the most densely populated urban environment in the US (nay, the world). Or to put it another way- if you earn $200,000 a year, you earn 130x the amount of someone living on minimum wage.
I'm not trying to attack people who have managed to earn a lot of money. But it would be nice if those who do have the common decency to recognise how wealthy they are, and show some empathy for the rest of the population (the 97% of Americans, in this case) who do not.
It's more depressing that you would think it isn't. The fact that someone can be in the top 3% of the country in terms of income and still kid themselves into thinking that they're "average, middle class Joes" is enough to make you want to join the Communist Party...
I don't think it's a controversial statement to say that Vista was not seen as a viable replacement for XP by the majority of people. Just ask Microsoft's Sales department. For a Windows release to peak at less than 20% was pretty humiliating.
The company I'm working for is not a software company- any software we produce is purely to support our core business. Sometimes this will be based on free toolsets, which we will then build into what we want (and pay our employees to do so, obviously). Sometimes (often) our software requirements are beyond what we can produce in house- so we pay other companies to do it for us.
The concept of bundling software up into a little cardboard box and selling it in the same manner as you'd sell a box of eggs is neither the only model for making and selling software, nor necessarily the sustainable one. It's looking increasingly like it is a bizarre anachronism. Software as a service, coding on demand, and building systems to fit the jobs, that's where the future sits. Once that code has been coded, it ceases to be a sellable product- it becomes just part of the ecosystem.
The "box of eggs" model for software development is excruciatingly wasteful. When my company wants a new system, there is always a massive amount of work to be done building, configuring and modifying available systems to meet our needs. What would the earthly point be of us starting completely from scratch and having to develop the whole ecosystem from the ground up first? We've got enough to do already!
Our rough equivalent would be the rabid "Europe is out to get us" crowd. As with your lot, they're convinced that they're at the centre of some terrible calamity which threatens to destroy their way of life, and also convinced that this is somehow common knowledge...
Unless something has changed since I looked into it last, Ubuntu doesn't have a EULA. It obviously has the GPL, which it may or may not prompt you to read and agree to. Other than that, some of the bundled proprietary software has EULAs, which it always prompts you to "agree to" when installing them- Flash, font packs, codecs, etc. If they're installed by default on this ultrabook, it's conceivable that you would be required to view the EULA on first run.
I thought we were talking about the last couple of decades. The Black Panthers haven't committed any acts of terrorism in that time that I recall. The Weather Underground were certainly terrorists, but haven't been active since the late 70s (35 years ago). Eco groups might well be active, but have they really committed any acts of genuine terrorism in the last 2 decades, in which people were killed or badly injured (or an attempt to do so)?
In the case of the Black Panthers, being nasty and having a distasteful political ideology doesn't make you automatically terrorists.
My, aren't memories short. There was the Sikh Temple massacre in Wisconsin which was carried out by a white supremacist- that was last year, and killed 6 (that's more than the Boston bombs so far, incidentally- although it's not exactly a competition, and the number of injuries in Boston more than make up for it). James vonn Brunn was a far-right extremist and neo-Nazi with connections with both the BNP and British National Front (both extreme-right organisations)- I'm not sure why you discount him as "pro-socialist". I don't think Dorner really counts as a terrorist as much as a regular old murderer- but if we're counting things on that scale, there are dozens of right-wing nut-jobs to join him. Jim Adkisson managed to kill two in 2008 after writing a manifesto promising to kill "Democrats, liberals and gays". James Kopp went on a series of shooting sprees, motivated principally by anti-abortion sentiments. Or there are the number of murders carried out by the Christian terrorist group Army of God, targeting doctors connected with abortion procedures. And lets not forget the Oklahoma City bombing.
I'm not aware of any genuinely left-wing terrorist movements in the United States, although of course they do exist elsewhere.
Islamist terrorists are plenty bad, but only an idiot assumes that they're the be-all-and-end-all of terrorism in the United States. They're just the trendy new kids on the block, who happened to hit the jackpot with the absurdly effective 9/11 attacks.
Debian is hardly aimed at casual users. You may be familiar with its far more popular offspring, Ubuntu and Mint, which are built especially for that market. Debian remains firmly in the domain of professionals and enthusiasts; and that is a group who need catering for too
I singled out Christians because they're the biggest religious group in America (by a very very long way), and I was talking about home-grown terrorists. America has become fixated on the concept of "Islamists" as the be all and end all of terror- as you rightly say, religious fundamentalists of all flavours can be extremely dangerous, and America has a lot more of one kind than it does the other.
Again, if I was worried about anyone in America, it's the White Supremacist, neo-Nazi, hyper-Christian ultra-Patriot types who I'd be worried about. They exist in large numbers, and even if most wouldn't dream of committing a real atrocity, it wouldn't take more than a fraction of a percentage of them to be that crazy to create a real threat.
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It also works in reverse, why don't the Palestinians negotiate for a settlement (and the answer I already gave: the Qur'an and hadiths command they commit genocide, but I guess you have a poor or no understanding of Islamic scripture, which is why you point the finger of blame in the wrong direction). In 1948 the UN offered two states, Israel accepted and the Arabs refused (believing their genocidal plan would be successful). The Israelis were prepared to negotiate, and have been prepared ever since to negotiate provided there are *no preconditions* (otherwise, what is the point of negotiating, yeah?).
Complete ill informed nonsense. The official Palestinian position is that they will negotiate on two fairly innocuous conditions. 1) That Israel ceases the construction of illegal settlements on its land. 2) That the starting point for negotiations for a two state solution be based on the pre-1967 borders. The latter point was accepted by the United Nations in Resolution 58/292 (Israel and the United States were the only two major nations to vote against it, joined by four small island nations). The former point is accepted by all (including the United States).
Israel refusing to freeze settlement building is a deliberate way of keeping negotiations off the table- Israel knows that there is no way any Palestinian group can negotiate with them under those circumstances, and that's the way the Israeli hard-right like it. And the 1967 border issue is considered by the international community to be a key component to making a viable Palestinian state- Israel refusing to consider it is the same as refusing to accept the possibility of a viable outcome of negotiations. The equivalent of haggling to buy a Ferrari and knowing that you're not willing to pay above $1000- it's entering the negotiations in bad faith.
Many people on the Palestinian side like to throw bile and rhetoric around (and plenty more are willing to throw bombs); but unless something viable is offered to the Palestinian moderates, then there can be no good solution.
It raises an interesting point on the concept of supply and demand. Historically, machinists have been quite low paid, as it was a blue collar profession with a large number of skilled practitioners. I'd be willing to bet that historically the skilled machinists working for your lab were paid less than the physicists. However now machining is not considered a desirable profession, and for low pay will not attract many new trainees.
So as the supply of machinists dries up, so too will their value. You might reach a point where the machinist is considered a highly valuable employee who needs to be paid a lot of money to retain. That might be the only way to attract people into it as a career.
One day, the machinists in your lab might be the best paid people in there!
You are looking at this from a very Americo-centric point of view (understandably so, considering this is an American company producing that quintessentially American item, the gun). But this perhaps has far greater implications for countries with tighter gun control, such as my native UK.
Here, there are almost no guns. A few licensed shotguns and whatnot, but practically nothing that would be really useful for violent purposes (such as a concealable handgun or semi-automatic rifles). Contrary to what the NRA would tell you, practically no criminals have guns either- shooting crimes are extremely rare (a gun fight is almost always national news). So if you get mugged in the street, it's most likely to be by someone wielding a Swiss Army Knife or a piece of old pipe, if indeed anything more than a rough demeanour and a good bit of intimidation. I know a number of people who have been "mugged" and have managed to see off their attacker with a firm "fuck off" and a well placed shove.
What happens to this system if the criminals can manufacture, cheaply, their own handguns? Suddenly the NRA's nonsense about criminals being the only ones with guns stops being nonsense. That's a big deal.
Counter point- neonicotinoids almost certainly affect all pollinators. Bees are the poster child as in reality they are by far the biggest modern pollinators. If we hadn't already killed most if the butterflies, they would be suffering from this just as badly.
If someone shoots one of my toes off, I'd be quite cross. Quite cross indeed. I don't want to sustain a permanent injury just because your friend likes walking around "gangsta style". Or thinks that one extra round in a concealed handgun is really going to be the difference between life and death for him at some point. If firing 6 rounds at an assailant isn't enough to save you, odds are the 7th won't either...
By your logic, get one of these second hand for half the price and call yourself a really savvy investor indeed.
Comparing second hand to new isn't that useful.
Call me the last of the dying paranoids, if you like, but I do not want to have my computer save my password for a programme which can access my money. Particularly not on a Windows partition.
I had that problem earlier this week.My broadband went down (as it is prone to every once in a while when there's heavy weather); switched on my desktop to play a game, Steam wouldn't get past the password screen. So I closed Steam (this was on my Windows 7 boot), and booted into Linux to play some non-Steam games (FTL: Faster Than Light, since you ask).
It's the reason I quit using Steam years ago, and it still doesn't seem to have gotten better. I've only reinstalled Steam now it has a Linux client as it's the easiest way for me to install the Linux version of a few Windows games I own (specifically- I wanted to install the Linux version of Darwinia). If I could avoid Steam and stick with Ubuntu Software Centre, GOG.com and Gamers Gate, without missing out on some of the best Linux gaming, then I probably would.
They were novelty (i.e., joke) golfball detectors. They do nothing. They are a moulded plastic shell with an extendible radio aerial stuck on the front. And a sticker on the side. There is no power source, no wiring, no circuitry- nothing. The only thing in the device which even remotely resembles electronics was in the "programme cards" which McCormick distributed with them (which didn't come with the original novelty toy), which contained an RFID tag similar to the ones high-street shops use to prevent shoplifting.
Bribes. Lots and lots of bribes. It isn't clear exactly how much was paid in bribes around the world as part of this scam, but as an example General al-Jabiri of Iraq was convicted of accepting "millions of dollars" in bribes in exchange for making his country's purchases.
This also explains why the authorities in some countries (e.g. Kenya, from TFA) are still swearing blind that they are authentic, and have been doing so since the scam was publicly denounced in 2010- the people responsible are still in power, and if they admit that they faked tests and due diligence, they're going to be in an awful lot of trouble. Far easier to claim that they worked under test conditions (maybe by magic!) than admit that you never tested them.
Fair enough. I was basing this off of a conversation I had a week or two ago with a Microsoft Consultant (from the Office side of things). He was talking about how Office 365 is (according to him) moving to rolling releases rather than formal year-based releases, and that (he thought) Windows was moving in the same direction with Blue. But that wasn't his specialist subject, and nor was it a particularly in-depth conversation, so I wouldn't read too much into it as insider knowledge. I may have even misunderstood.
If only we could establish some sort of formal, coordinated system for extracting money out of people, proportional to their earnings, to pay for local infrastructure projects. Think, boy, think!
Did you use any of the early versions? They needed to make a lot of fixes, and fast!
Actually, I did just look this up- this is already the 5th version of Ubuntu to ship with Unity, so even progressing at just one version number at each release, this would still be up to 5. That makes me feel like time is moving too fast, and I want to get off.
Not that I disagree with you (because I don't)- but isn't Microsoft going with rolling releases on "Windows Blue"?
That is taking a very strict view of "right wing" and a very liberal view of "left wing". It is generally accepted that fascism falls on the right of the left/right spectrum, if anywhere. Fascism commonly uses "socialist" as a phrase to describe itself, due to it's focus on syndicalism and/or corporatism, and it's focus on "strength in unity" nationalism. It is also generally considered anti-capitalist. The use of the phrase "socialist" by fascists is generally considered to be almost completely unrelated, in a philosophical sense, to the common usage of "socialism" to refer to the ideology derived from or related to Marxism. To quote Brunn himself:
WESTERN SOCIALISM, unlike Marxism/Communism and Capitalism, emanates not from Reason alone but from the ETHOS OF THE WEST. It expresses the instinctive and Intuitive feelings UNIQUE to the Aryan Nation. Its Idea is the Musketeers' cry: “One for All and All for One!” The ingathering of the White Nation-States into ONE CULTURAL ORGANISM — its own territory and its own State in which to house, protect, and nurture the Nation — precludes Marxist inspired class warfare and hate-struggles between its component parts. The ECONOMY springs from the CULTURE. MONEY becomes merely a tool, a means of exchange, a storage of value — not an ILLUMINATI weapon.”
So that would be the anti-Marx, corporatist use of the term "socialism" usually attributed to fascism. Mixed with a good dose of the crazies.
Contrary to the common view, left/right is not synonymous with socialism/capitalism. "Left wing" is a term that is generally taken to include socialism, communism, social anarchism, anarcho-syndaclism, and the green movement- which are all pretty much mutually exclusive and not directly related to each other. "Right wing" at the very least includes free market capitalism, fascism, theocracy and monarchism- again, generally mutually exclusive, nor directly related.
I'm sorry, but that just isn't true. If you earn $200,000 a year, you are not average.
The average household income in the US is $41,994 (according to Wikipedia, 1999). The average household income in Los Angeles (according to city-data.com, 2009) is $48,617. Average in New York City is $50,033. So if your household earns $200,000, you earn the same as four average families in the most densely populated urban environment in the US (nay, the world). Or to put it another way- if you earn $200,000 a year, you earn 130x the amount of someone living on minimum wage.
I'm not trying to attack people who have managed to earn a lot of money. But it would be nice if those who do have the common decency to recognise how wealthy they are, and show some empathy for the rest of the population (the 97% of Americans, in this case) who do not.
It's more depressing that you would think it isn't. The fact that someone can be in the top 3% of the country in terms of income and still kid themselves into thinking that they're "average, middle class Joes" is enough to make you want to join the Communist Party...
I don't think it's a controversial statement to say that Vista was not seen as a viable replacement for XP by the majority of people. Just ask Microsoft's Sales department. For a Windows release to peak at less than 20% was pretty humiliating.
The company I'm working for is not a software company- any software we produce is purely to support our core business. Sometimes this will be based on free toolsets, which we will then build into what we want (and pay our employees to do so, obviously). Sometimes (often) our software requirements are beyond what we can produce in house- so we pay other companies to do it for us.
The concept of bundling software up into a little cardboard box and selling it in the same manner as you'd sell a box of eggs is neither the only model for making and selling software, nor necessarily the sustainable one. It's looking increasingly like it is a bizarre anachronism. Software as a service, coding on demand, and building systems to fit the jobs, that's where the future sits. Once that code has been coded, it ceases to be a sellable product- it becomes just part of the ecosystem.
The "box of eggs" model for software development is excruciatingly wasteful. When my company wants a new system, there is always a massive amount of work to be done building, configuring and modifying available systems to meet our needs. What would the earthly point be of us starting completely from scratch and having to develop the whole ecosystem from the ground up first? We've got enough to do already!
Our rough equivalent would be the rabid "Europe is out to get us" crowd. As with your lot, they're convinced that they're at the centre of some terrible calamity which threatens to destroy their way of life, and also convinced that this is somehow common knowledge...
Unless something has changed since I looked into it last, Ubuntu doesn't have a EULA. It obviously has the GPL, which it may or may not prompt you to read and agree to. Other than that, some of the bundled proprietary software has EULAs, which it always prompts you to "agree to" when installing them- Flash, font packs, codecs, etc. If they're installed by default on this ultrabook, it's conceivable that you would be required to view the EULA on first run.
I thought we were talking about the last couple of decades. The Black Panthers haven't committed any acts of terrorism in that time that I recall. The Weather Underground were certainly terrorists, but haven't been active since the late 70s (35 years ago). Eco groups might well be active, but have they really committed any acts of genuine terrorism in the last 2 decades, in which people were killed or badly injured (or an attempt to do so)?
In the case of the Black Panthers, being nasty and having a distasteful political ideology doesn't make you automatically terrorists.
My, aren't memories short. There was the Sikh Temple massacre in Wisconsin which was carried out by a white supremacist- that was last year, and killed 6 (that's more than the Boston bombs so far, incidentally- although it's not exactly a competition, and the number of injuries in Boston more than make up for it). James vonn Brunn was a far-right extremist and neo-Nazi with connections with both the BNP and British National Front (both extreme-right organisations)- I'm not sure why you discount him as "pro-socialist". I don't think Dorner really counts as a terrorist as much as a regular old murderer- but if we're counting things on that scale, there are dozens of right-wing nut-jobs to join him. Jim Adkisson managed to kill two in 2008 after writing a manifesto promising to kill "Democrats, liberals and gays". James Kopp went on a series of shooting sprees, motivated principally by anti-abortion sentiments. Or there are the number of murders carried out by the Christian terrorist group Army of God, targeting doctors connected with abortion procedures. And lets not forget the Oklahoma City bombing.
I'm not aware of any genuinely left-wing terrorist movements in the United States, although of course they do exist elsewhere.
Islamist terrorists are plenty bad, but only an idiot assumes that they're the be-all-and-end-all of terrorism in the United States. They're just the trendy new kids on the block, who happened to hit the jackpot with the absurdly effective 9/11 attacks.
Debian is hardly aimed at casual users. You may be familiar with its far more popular offspring, Ubuntu and Mint, which are built especially for that market. Debian remains firmly in the domain of professionals and enthusiasts; and that is a group who need catering for too
I singled out Christians because they're the biggest religious group in America (by a very very long way), and I was talking about home-grown terrorists. America has become fixated on the concept of "Islamists" as the be all and end all of terror- as you rightly say, religious fundamentalists of all flavours can be extremely dangerous, and America has a lot more of one kind than it does the other.
Again, if I was worried about anyone in America, it's the White Supremacist, neo-Nazi, hyper-Christian ultra-Patriot types who I'd be worried about. They exist in large numbers, and even if most wouldn't dream of committing a real atrocity, it wouldn't take more than a fraction of a percentage of them to be that crazy to create a real threat.