NIS supports shadow, so there's no need to distribute an unshadowed passwd map like your example.
Anyway a lot of unix systems that have been around for a long time use NIS still. This is probably why it's still on the RedHat certs (people wanting to put a redhat workstation on their existing network, or to upgrade their existing NIS server to something newer).
Besides, it can be a pain to get rid of using NIS, especially on older networks. So it will probably be around, and will need to be supported, for many many years.
eh, it can't be proved from the existing literature that the Morrigan is actually all three of the figures with whom she's associated. And i prefer Cuchulain. That spouting fountain of blood is so sexy.
*snicker* hon, i thought somehow that my name might make my feminine pride clear from the outset. go look up the "Morrigan" in any book of irish mythology. "useless"? only to the stubbornly ignorant, i suppose.
i never claimed to be objective, darlin'. i am, after all, a woman, and it's a little hard to be objective when you're the one being insulted by default of your sex. the link, btw, is a pretty good resource; sometimes fem-nazi, sometimes just feminist, but always interesting and thought-provoking. i don't agree with everything they print, but then again, why the heck would you want to read things you can't argue with? that's boring...
R-E-S-P-E-C-T! Find out what it means to me! ;-)
on
ALICE vs. ALICE
·
· Score: 1
We know we have weaknesses and we know there's some truth to stereotypes, and we embrace that and laugh and then get on with life.
Yes, we can laugh when we "know there's some truth to the stereotype." Every single time my friends and i get into conversations about D&D, or whenever we objectively listen to our dinner conversations, we laugh at what total dorks we are. However, the person who wrote that post was not one woman making jokes with a bunch of other women. Add to that the fact that there's no truth to the stereotype anyway, it's a tired old line that has been used many times in the past and still is used to justify mistreatment of a particular group, and you can see it's not something that can be laughed at. I know my weaknesses as a person. Some of them may have to do with my being female, such as the fact that i become short-tempered and physically achy at certain times of the month (feel free to make PMS jokes! i'll laugh at those!); however, my intelligence or lack thereof has nothing to do with my sex. And the attitude that "women just act smart but aren't really smart" has been used to justify many ridiculous restrictions placed on women's education and women's employment. It's not a funny joke, any more than "black people are mentally inferior to whites" is a funny joke. We can all get away from the designation of "dork" or "geek;" it's not necessarily an integral part of who we are and how we conceptualize ourselves. There are other roles into which you can put yourself, such as rockclimber, music lover, wine afficianado, etc. However, you can't get away from your gender (without a sex-change operation and lots of hormone therapy) and to have someone apparently sincerely insult you on that basis is for them to take a swipe at an integral part of what makes you the person you are. Y'all have got to understand how often we women hear this sort of sh**, and how un-funny it gets after the first 50 times.
I'm not pushing for political correctness, just respect. That's why i'm trying to explain this instead of merely lashing out and saying "All men are a**holes!!" To say that would not only be profoundly wrong, but also immensely disrespectful of all the incredibly wonderful men that i know. And as for laughing along and making friends, hell, man, why would i want to be friends with someone who straight off said something that offensive? Some things i can laugh at. Dead baby jokes crack me up. I'm blond and i laugh at blond jokes, even though i don't particularly like them. But making a crack that tries to separate my femaleness from my intelligence just goes too far; it's got too many outer implications, intended or no, to be a source of amusement.
I'm sorry- since when does asking for a modicum of respect make a woman "nasty" and "man-hating"? Especially when a *boy* can say something like "When talking to a woman they can generally fake it and pretend to be smart"? How the heck is that supposed to make any intelligent, self-respecting woman laugh? Wait... my apologies, i guess the women's rights movement of the 1970's hasn't made its way into the tech-world yet. And frankly, tekunokurato, the fact that cracks like that are found in sitcoms does not make them any less offensive, only more horrifying because so many people think that it's okay and funny to pigeonhole over half the world into a very narrow and insulting box.
This of course touches on the biggest problem, which is: why the *hell* can corporations have more rights than people, and why are they basically allowed to *own* people? (i think someone mentioned in a different thread that contracts of this sort were struck down in Sweden b/c slavery is outlawed there.) Once upon a time, business owners hired people to implement their (the business owner's) ideas. Now they hire people so they can exploit the employees' ideas. I mean, honestly, what is this but a form of slavery? Yes, you get paid, but this "corporation"- not even another individual, but an amorphous thing that does not need to eat or sleep- owns all your work and pretty much all your thoughts. Sounds like a serfdom to me, only "Here I'll give you this plot of land to farm and you have to give me 4/5 of all the vegetebles you produce" has become "Here I'll give you this cubicle to sit in and equipment to play with and you have to give me all ideas that may happen to pass through your head." The great American corporate system(it ain't really even capitalist anymore, chickies) is really just a reincarnation of feudalism. It's really about time we start treating corporations for what they are: groups of people trying to get rich of others' work and ideas. Check out http://www.poclad.org
You have somewhat of a point- I should have chosen my language more carefully- fr'instance "4-year" instead of "normal." But I think you misread what I meant to be concern as elitist snobbery. I wasn't actually discounting community college students as "beer-driven, ADHD-addled, awe-struck and stupefied invalids"; I was discounting society at large, and that even goes for students at 4-year institutions. I have lost faith in much of our culture- for many people, if something goes on too long without interruption, they get bored and look for something that will better entertainment. I guarantee you that most of the people who have now seen _Fellowship of the Rings_ as a movie have never read the book. And my statement that this development should be no less alarming at a community college was in response to previous messages in the thread that stated something along the lines of "Hey, what's the big deal? It's *just* a community college. Not like they're serious students who need to research anything", a view which I personally feel is more elitist(and more worrisome) than my own lost faith in American culture.
I'm with Archfeld and macrom on this one- coincidentally I *am* an English lit grad student- at this point you can't do any sort of major research, i'd bet in any field, without actual books. There's too much old stuff that hasn't been put online and cannot be found as e-books. Despite screams of "Progress!" old research is relevant- it's kind of silly to ignorantly repeat old arguments/experiments that have already been debunked. The fact that this is a community college should make it no less alarming. What if some of these kids go on to a normal college or university and can't cope with regular research? Not to mention the fact that it's only going to increase the difficulties people already have with short attention spans. The boring paper book doesn't flash enough pretty lights, so it's not worth my time. I think I'd rather watch this cool short movie which was put together by a mainstream media source, and which is punctuated by beer advertisements. Scary. The most interesting thing that I noticed in the article was the paragraph where they mentioned that many students still print out their materials. It's kinda hard to mark up a digital text unless you've got the right programs.
Yes, it could be, but that's politics for you. People don't matter because you can always make more. If you really want to make some sort of difference, find some sort of cause to get involved in in your locality. How can we expect the government to do anything if we ourselves refuse to? Governmental apathy stems from individual apathy.
"Also, regarding life, it's unlikely that life would have evolved on any body that did not have liquid water."
Okay, I'm *not* a planetary science type or a molecular biologist type(being a lit grad student), but haven't they been discovering bacterial life in some really weird places on Earth? Places with both extremely cold and extremely hot temperatures? So it is possible that some bacterial life might survive in those frozen seas that have been discovered on Mars. I do agree with you, though; no point in speculating too wildly until we have samples to study.
*laughs* Good point, fizbin. And those are exactly the parents with whom i was taking issue in my post. We don't need to pay attention to sweetie-poo Johnny; he would *never* do anything naughty!
heh. Frankly, i have to agree with some previous posters- kids will see it as another dead, no-fun area, and find ways around the blocks. And what was that about "no interactive features"? No chat rooms? The kiddies who go online *for* chat rooms are going to see this domain as basically useless. And besides, there's still IM. And i had to laugh at John Shimkus' remark: "libraries have children's book sections, why can't the Internet have the same type of section devoted to children's interests?" O fer crissake. How many of you actually stuck to reading the books in the children's book section when you were a kid? I sure as heck didn't.
I still argue for more parental involvement. Why are these kids able to meet online friends IRL without the parents being there?? What was a *6th-grader* doing meeting a strange person without her mom or dad? The computer is not a babysitter. Parents should be enough involved in their kids' lives to know what's going on, and they should develop a relationship in which the kids trust them enough to tell them. It can happen. This bill looks like just another way for parents to plead ignorance when something awful happens to their kids that their involvement could've prevented. "But i had her computer set to only go to kids.us domains! How was i to know she'd gotten around the block??" Come *on*. Take responsibility for your own lack of action.
Umm, do we really *have* a right to privacy? I don't believe it's in the Bill of Rights; it's just one of those things we all expect should be there. People have been arrested and convicted of indecency b/c peeping toms looked in through their windows and saw them having sex in their *own home*.
At first, I reacted to this with an "ewww, creepy! here comes Big Brother again!" but then I wondered what exactly they're planning to use it for. Are they comparing specific mug shots when looking for on-the-run criminals? Or trying to scan areas for potential troublemakers? The one's pretty useful, the other's kinda sketchy, ethically. Either way, they should probably make it clear to buyers that their phones will be used in their capacity, hopefully even be required to get their permission. *snicker* End result, of course, is that we've got one more thing to be paranoid of: "Quick, duck behind that potted palm, here comes somebody with a cell phone!" Instead of merely wanting to strangle the loud cell phone users, we'll be uneasy around them, 'cause they might be spying on us.
I've never quite understood this, "wait til you're old and don't want to have fun anymore" crap. If you're going to commit to someone who's going to try and rule your life, you're stupid anyway.
That said, Yow, bflong. Do remember, you're *only* 22. You've got the rest of your life for this. There's just as many good women out there as good men, it's just a matter of cutting through the morons. Can take a horrid long time tho. But don't worry, you'll find someone.
Yeah, i *know* i'm offtopic, and i don't really care right now. Have a nice day!:-)
Yeah, i did the exact same thing when i saw that one as when i saw this. AWWWWW!!! Damn, i'm such a girl. And such a sucker for geeky ways of doing things.
Congrats, you two!!
Well, it does work for those of us girls who aren't cool enough to be _real_ geeks (i'm just as nerdy, i just happen to be in a non-computer field) and have S.O.'s who are. But that's a darn good question... why don't they make a male version of that shirt?
"We needed to build cadence," Mr. Wilke said, "to operate to the drumbeat of the constraint."
I think that this was my favorite line from the Amazon article. Cadence, hmm? Drumbeats? Y'know what _else_ used cadence and drumbeats to keep the worker moving on schedule? Galleys rowed by slaves, railroad chain gangs, weaving factories during the Industrial Revolution. All things associated with SLAVERY. Liberty and Justice for all? Nah, not in a capitalist society.
Idylls of the King: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was a member of the BRITISH aristocracy. It was written between 1859 and 1885.
In Wales in the 5th century, they spoke Old Welsh. In Cornwall, they spoke Cornish. From what little history I've had that deals with late antiquity, I'm pretty sure that the Cornish were much more Romanized that the Welsh; remember, Wales was one of the problem areas that the Legions were having a hard time clearing out. Different tribes, different cultures. Yes, you're dealing with someone who's a strong proponent of the 7 nations theory: Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Mann, Brittainy, and England; however, if you're going to inanely insist that the cultures are the same, then you had better just call the whole batch British, and not Welsh.
I think EmBaggins covered the Merlin problem rather well. The character, possible etymological derivations notwithstanding, is definitely a mixture of at least two totally different personalities.
Err, Narnia's been having problems with fundies? That's FUNNY! And no, i don't think they have. They (along with most of C.S. Lewis' works) have been getting billed as "moral fantasy". And HP's not? *snigger* I hate stupid people.:)
One of the problems dealing with the "historical Arthur" is that actual early sources are so darn sketchy. Nennius merely says, "Then Arthur along with the kings of Britain fought against them in those days, but Arthur himself was the military commander ["dux bellorum"]." (ch. 56 of Nennius- see the online text at the Camelot Project). Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his "History of the Kings of Britain" around 1136, says that he used several sources, of which Nennius was probably one. Monmouth places Arthur in Cornwall, not Wales.
Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte D'Arthur, was English. While we don't know much about his location besides the fact that he was in prison, he does state his sources as "French books" (see Vinaver's edition of Le Morte, p. vii). But Arthur himself, if he existed? Cornish, Welsh, British, Breton (which is actually NOT a supposition I've heard, but at any rate isn't Wales) Who knows. Same for Merlin. His origins are also rather obscure. You can't say he wasn't Welsh, but you also definitely cannot say that he _was_.
"Fairy tales" as we want to believe them to be, are NOT a literary tradition. If you're going to look at fairy tales as the "once upon a times" that have been told by parents and grandparents and storytellers since the dawn of time, they are NOT WRITTEN. They are an ORAL tradition, which is very different. That's the reason that folklorists occupy a different realm of study than most literature scholars. Yes, Perrault and the Brothers Grimm wrote many of the "fairy tales" (or wonder tales, or whatever) down, and edited the hell out of them, but they're still not exactly what people usually think of as "literature." Medieval Arthuriana, OTOH, is much more of a "created" and "literary" genre. Malory and Chretien actually composed full-fledged works of literature that fit pretty well in the Medieval Romance genre.
And I think I disagree with your comment that "some of the oldest aspects of Western lititure[sic] are Fairy Tales." Most of the surviving material we have, such as the stuff from ancient Greece, fits more into the category of mythology and epic. Even the Celtic tales that are currently making a comeback are mythology and epic, not folktales.
And, heh, have you ever read the original, not-cleaned up by prissy translators, Bros. Grimm stuff? Not insipid. Noooo way. Bloody, dirty, and scary.
"Actually the original Arthurian myths, including Merlin et al. are from Welsh and other early Celtic cultures."
Hmm, I don't think this is actually provable at the moment. There are some overlaps between Arthurian stuff and the Mabinogion, as well as other Welsh poetry, but much of the Arthurian material was newly-written, especially the stories concerning the French knights, and the Grail.
And for online *Arthurian* texts, take a look at the Camelot Project at:
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/cphome.stm
We've got all sorts of Arthurian stuff up that you can't find copies of. A lot of it's 19th century crud, but it's at least interesting, and gives you an idea of what modern Arthuriana is coming out of. And yes, this is the second time i've posted the URL. I'm a very bad person.
Slashdot Mirror
NIS supports shadow, so there's no need to distribute an unshadowed passwd map like your example.
Anyway a lot of unix systems that have been around for a long time use NIS still. This is probably why it's still on the RedHat certs (people wanting to put a redhat workstation on their existing network, or to upgrade their existing NIS server to something newer).
Besides, it can be a pain to get rid of using NIS, especially on older networks. So it will probably be around, and will need to be supported, for many many years.
eh, it can't be proved from the existing literature that the Morrigan is actually all three of the figures with whom she's associated. And i prefer Cuchulain. That spouting fountain of blood is so sexy.
*snicker* hon, i thought somehow that my name might make my feminine pride clear from the outset. go look up the "Morrigan" in any book of irish mythology. "useless"? only to the stubbornly ignorant, i suppose.
It's not supposed to make an "intelligent, self-respecting woman" laugh, it's supposed to make a dumb man laugh.
:-)
good point. i guess this is why i don't hang out with dumb men.
i never claimed to be objective, darlin'. i am, after all, a woman, and it's a little hard to be objective when you're the one being insulted by default of your sex. the link, btw, is a pretty good resource; sometimes fem-nazi, sometimes just feminist, but always interesting and thought-provoking. i don't agree with everything they print, but then again, why the heck would you want to read things you can't argue with? that's boring...
We know we have weaknesses and we know there's some truth to stereotypes, and we embrace that and laugh and then get on with life.
Yes, we can laugh when we "know there's some truth to the stereotype." Every single time my friends and i get into conversations about D&D, or whenever we objectively listen to our dinner conversations, we laugh at what total dorks we are. However, the person who wrote that post was not one woman making jokes with a bunch of other women. Add to that the fact that there's no truth to the stereotype anyway, it's a tired old line that has been used many times in the past and still is used to justify mistreatment of a particular group, and you can see it's not something that can be laughed at. I know my weaknesses as a person. Some of them may have to do with my being female, such as the fact that i become short-tempered and physically achy at certain times of the month (feel free to make PMS jokes! i'll laugh at those!); however, my intelligence or lack thereof has nothing to do with my sex. And the attitude that "women just act smart but aren't really smart" has been used to justify many ridiculous restrictions placed on women's education and women's employment. It's not a funny joke, any more than "black people are mentally inferior to whites" is a funny joke. We can all get away from the designation of "dork" or "geek;" it's not necessarily an integral part of who we are and how we conceptualize ourselves. There are other roles into which you can put yourself, such as rockclimber, music lover, wine afficianado, etc. However, you can't get away from your gender (without a sex-change operation and lots of hormone therapy) and to have someone apparently sincerely insult you on that basis is for them to take a swipe at an integral part of what makes you the person you are. Y'all have got to understand how often we women hear this sort of sh**, and how un-funny it gets after the first 50 times.
I'm not pushing for political correctness, just respect. That's why i'm trying to explain this instead of merely lashing out and saying "All men are a**holes!!" To say that would not only be profoundly wrong, but also immensely disrespectful of all the incredibly wonderful men that i know. And as for laughing along and making friends, hell, man, why would i want to be friends with someone who straight off said something that offensive? Some things i can laugh at. Dead baby jokes crack me up. I'm blond and i laugh at blond jokes, even though i don't particularly like them. But making a crack that tries to separate my femaleness from my intelligence just goes too far; it's got too many outer implications, intended or no, to be a source of amusement.
I'm sorry- since when does asking for a modicum of respect make a woman "nasty" and "man-hating"? Especially when a *boy* can say something like "When talking to a woman they can generally fake it and pretend to be smart"? How the heck is that supposed to make any intelligent, self-respecting woman laugh? Wait... my apologies, i guess the women's rights movement of the 1970's hasn't made its way into the tech-world yet.
And frankly, tekunokurato, the fact that cracks like that are found in sitcoms does not make them any less offensive, only more horrifying because so many people think that it's okay and funny to pigeonhole over half the world into a very narrow and insulting box.
This of course touches on the biggest problem, which is: why the *hell* can corporations have more rights than people, and why are they basically allowed to *own* people? (i think someone mentioned in a different thread that contracts of this sort were struck down in Sweden b/c slavery is outlawed there.) Once upon a time, business owners hired people to implement their (the business owner's) ideas. Now they hire people so they can exploit the employees' ideas. I mean, honestly, what is this but a form of slavery? Yes, you get paid, but this "corporation"- not even another individual, but an amorphous thing that does not need to eat or sleep- owns all your work and pretty much all your thoughts. Sounds like a serfdom to me, only "Here I'll give you this plot of land to farm and you have to give me 4/5 of all the vegetebles you produce" has become "Here I'll give you this cubicle to sit in and equipment to play with and you have to give me all ideas that may happen to pass through your head." The great American corporate system(it ain't really even capitalist anymore, chickies) is really just a reincarnation of feudalism. It's really about time we start treating corporations for what they are: groups of people trying to get rich of others' work and ideas. Check out http://www.poclad.org
You have somewhat of a point- I should have chosen my language more carefully- fr'instance "4-year" instead of "normal." But I think you misread what I meant to be concern as elitist snobbery. I wasn't actually discounting community college students as "beer-driven, ADHD-addled, awe-struck and stupefied invalids"; I was discounting society at large, and that even goes for students at 4-year institutions. I have lost faith in much of our culture- for many people, if something goes on too long without interruption, they get bored and look for something that will better entertainment. I guarantee you that most of the people who have now seen _Fellowship of the Rings_ as a movie have never read the book. And my statement that this development should be no less alarming at a community college was in response to previous messages in the thread that stated something along the lines of "Hey, what's the big deal? It's *just* a community college. Not like they're serious students who need to research anything", a view which I personally feel is more elitist(and more worrisome) than my own lost faith in American culture.
I'm with Archfeld and macrom on this one- coincidentally I *am* an English lit grad student- at this point you can't do any sort of major research, i'd bet in any field, without actual books. There's too much old stuff that hasn't been put online and cannot be found as e-books. Despite screams of "Progress!" old research is relevant- it's kind of silly to ignorantly repeat old arguments/experiments that have already been debunked.
The fact that this is a community college should make it no less alarming. What if some of these kids go on to a normal college or university and can't cope with regular research? Not to mention the fact that it's only going to increase the difficulties people already have with short attention spans. The boring paper book doesn't flash enough pretty lights, so it's not worth my time. I think I'd rather watch this cool short movie which was put together by a mainstream media source, and which is punctuated by beer advertisements. Scary.
The most interesting thing that I noticed in the article was the paragraph where they mentioned that many students still print out their materials. It's kinda hard to mark up a digital text unless you've got the right programs.
Yes, it could be, but that's politics for you. People don't matter because you can always make more. If you really want to make some sort of difference, find some sort of cause to get involved in in your locality. How can we expect the government to do anything if we ourselves refuse to? Governmental apathy stems from individual apathy.
"Also, regarding life, it's unlikely that life would have evolved on any body that did not have liquid water."
Okay, I'm *not* a planetary science type or a molecular biologist type(being a lit grad student), but haven't they been discovering bacterial life in some really weird places on Earth? Places with both extremely cold and extremely hot temperatures? So it is possible that some bacterial life might survive in those frozen seas that have been discovered on Mars. I do agree with you, though; no point in speculating too wildly until we have samples to study.
*laughs* Good point, fizbin. And those are exactly the parents with whom i was taking issue in my post. We don't need to pay attention to sweetie-poo Johnny; he would *never* do anything naughty!
heh. Frankly, i have to agree with some previous posters- kids will see it as another dead, no-fun area, and find ways around the blocks. And what was that about "no interactive features"? No chat rooms? The kiddies who go online *for* chat rooms are going to see this domain as basically useless. And besides, there's still IM. And i had to laugh at John Shimkus' remark: "libraries have children's book sections, why can't the Internet have the same type of section devoted to children's interests?" O fer crissake. How many of you actually stuck to reading the books in the children's book section when you were a kid? I sure as heck didn't.
I still argue for more parental involvement. Why are these kids able to meet online friends IRL without the parents being there?? What was a *6th-grader* doing meeting a strange person without her mom or dad? The computer is not a babysitter. Parents should be enough involved in their kids' lives to know what's going on, and they should develop a relationship in which the kids trust them enough to tell them. It can happen. This bill looks like just another way for parents to plead ignorance when something awful happens to their kids that their involvement could've prevented. "But i had her computer set to only go to kids.us domains! How was i to know she'd gotten around the block??" Come *on*. Take responsibility for your own lack of action.
Umm, do we really *have* a right to privacy? I don't believe it's in the Bill of Rights; it's just one of those things we all expect should be there. People have been arrested and convicted of indecency b/c peeping toms looked in through their windows and saw them having sex in their *own home*.
At first, I reacted to this with an "ewww, creepy! here comes Big Brother again!" but then I wondered what exactly they're planning to use it for. Are they comparing specific mug shots when looking for on-the-run criminals? Or trying to scan areas for potential troublemakers? The one's pretty useful, the other's kinda sketchy, ethically. Either way, they should probably make it clear to buyers that their phones will be used in their capacity, hopefully even be required to get their permission. *snicker* End result, of course, is that we've got one more thing to be paranoid of: "Quick, duck behind that potted palm, here comes somebody with a cell phone!" Instead of merely wanting to strangle the loud cell phone users, we'll be uneasy around them, 'cause they might be spying on us.
I've never quite understood this, "wait til you're old and don't want to have fun anymore" crap. If you're going to commit to someone who's going to try and rule your life, you're stupid anyway.
:-)
That said, Yow, bflong. Do remember, you're *only* 22. You've got the rest of your life for this. There's just as many good women out there as good men, it's just a matter of cutting through the morons. Can take a horrid long time tho. But don't worry, you'll find someone.
Yeah, i *know* i'm offtopic, and i don't really care right now. Have a nice day!
Yeah, i did the exact same thing when i saw that one as when i saw this. AWWWWW!!! Damn, i'm such a girl. And such a sucker for geeky ways of doing things.
Congrats, you two!!
Well, it does work for those of us girls who aren't cool enough to be _real_ geeks (i'm just as nerdy, i just happen to be in a non-computer field) and have S.O.'s who are. But that's a darn good question... why don't they make a male version of that shirt?
"We needed to build cadence," Mr. Wilke said, "to operate to the drumbeat of the constraint."
I think that this was my favorite line from the Amazon article. Cadence, hmm? Drumbeats? Y'know what _else_ used cadence and drumbeats to keep the worker moving on schedule? Galleys rowed by slaves, railroad chain gangs, weaving factories during the Industrial Revolution. All things associated with SLAVERY. Liberty and Justice for all? Nah, not in a capitalist society.
i hate money.
Idylls of the King: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, was a member of the BRITISH aristocracy. It was written between 1859 and 1885.
In Wales in the 5th century, they spoke Old Welsh. In Cornwall, they spoke Cornish. From what little history I've had that deals with late antiquity, I'm pretty sure that the Cornish were much more Romanized that the Welsh; remember, Wales was one of the problem areas that the Legions were having a hard time clearing out. Different tribes, different cultures. Yes, you're dealing with someone who's a strong proponent of the 7 nations theory: Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Mann, Brittainy, and England; however, if you're going to inanely insist that the cultures are the same, then you had better just call the whole batch British, and not Welsh.
I think EmBaggins covered the Merlin problem rather well. The character, possible etymological derivations notwithstanding, is definitely a mixture of at least two totally different personalities.
Err, Narnia's been having problems with fundies? That's FUNNY! And no, i don't think they have. They (along with most of C.S. Lewis' works) have been getting billed as "moral fantasy". And HP's not? *snigger* I hate stupid people. :)
One of the problems dealing with the "historical Arthur" is that actual early sources are so darn sketchy. Nennius merely says, "Then Arthur along with the kings of Britain fought against them in those days, but Arthur himself was the military commander ["dux bellorum"]." (ch. 56 of Nennius- see the online text at the Camelot Project). Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote his "History of the Kings of Britain" around 1136, says that he used several sources, of which Nennius was probably one. Monmouth places Arthur in Cornwall, not Wales.
Sir Thomas Malory, author of Le Morte D'Arthur, was English. While we don't know much about his location besides the fact that he was in prison, he does state his sources as "French books" (see Vinaver's edition of Le Morte, p. vii). But Arthur himself, if he existed? Cornish, Welsh, British, Breton (which is actually NOT a supposition I've heard, but at any rate isn't Wales) Who knows. Same for Merlin. His origins are also rather obscure. You can't say he wasn't Welsh, but you also definitely cannot say that he _was_.
"Fairy tales" as we want to believe them to be, are NOT a literary tradition. If you're going to look at fairy tales as the "once upon a times" that have been told by parents and grandparents and storytellers since the dawn of time, they are NOT WRITTEN. They are an ORAL tradition, which is very different. That's the reason that folklorists occupy a different realm of study than most literature scholars. Yes, Perrault and the Brothers Grimm wrote many of the "fairy tales" (or wonder tales, or whatever) down, and edited the hell out of them, but they're still not exactly what people usually think of as "literature." Medieval Arthuriana, OTOH, is much more of a "created" and "literary" genre. Malory and Chretien actually composed full-fledged works of literature that fit pretty well in the Medieval Romance genre.
And I think I disagree with your comment that "some of the oldest aspects of Western lititure[sic] are Fairy Tales." Most of the surviving material we have, such as the stuff from ancient Greece, fits more into the category of mythology and epic. Even the Celtic tales that are currently making a comeback are mythology and epic, not folktales.
And, heh, have you ever read the original, not-cleaned up by prissy translators, Bros. Grimm stuff? Not insipid. Noooo way. Bloody, dirty, and scary.
"Actually the original Arthurian myths, including Merlin et al. are from Welsh and other early Celtic cultures."
Hmm, I don't think this is actually provable at the moment. There are some overlaps between Arthurian stuff and the Mabinogion, as well as other Welsh poetry, but much of the Arthurian material was newly-written, especially the stories concerning the French knights, and the Grail.
And for online *Arthurian* texts, take a look at the Camelot Project at:
http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/cphome.stm
We've got all sorts of Arthurian stuff up that you can't find copies of. A lot of it's 19th century crud, but it's at least interesting, and gives you an idea of what modern Arthuriana is coming out of. And yes, this is the second time i've posted the URL. I'm a very bad person.