"Right, but this is only possible because people accept religion. If people were taught to reject religion or any other belief system that requires blind, unquestioning adherence, and to think critically about what they support and why, and demand justification for action, then these powerful leaders wouldn't have much power to incite violence any more. They would have to have a much better justification than "god says we must attack!" Again, you keep attacking religion, when it sounds like the actual source of the problem is power and authoritative government. If they didn't have religion, they still have nationalism, ethnicity, and race to incite the common folk to warfare. Why do you keep harping on religion, when the problem is obviously despotic political rulers and the power they wield? If you are so concerned that they are using religion as a cover, are you equally critical of nationalism, ethnicity, and race? Because those are the justifications that are used alongside religion to justify warfare.
Even if we took away all the excuses they currently use -- religion, nationalism, ethnicity, race -- they would find new ones. Why not go after the actual source of the evil, instead of just one of their propaganda cover stories?
Add to that the fact that your 'working-stiff' programmer actually wants to get the job done and not have to fix all kinds of crazy bugs in crappy, old, deprecated software, it looks more like it was a deliberate choice to use Jet, and it was not for reasons of creating secure, accurate elections.
Why would anyone write such a large and critical system using Jet today, when even Microsoft tells you not to? The only answer is incompetence. There is another answer.
If you wanted to make an insecure system that was easy to hack and manipulate, didn't have basic security features, data integrity, and no audit trail, and thus no record of how data was altered outside of specifications, you might use such a deprecated application.
But it seems like you're basically admitting that religion is a major contributor to violence and evil, though not a necessary cause of it. I'm not saying that it's a contributor, I'm saying that it's the *cover story*. It's not the cause, but the scapegoat. The real cause is power and politics, but religion gets the blame. Works out well for powerful people.
It serves to help power-hungry people convince others to do their bidding, in a way that's difficult to do otherwise. "Religion" has no agency. It's not a person; it doesn't do anything. Rather, is the powerful religious and political leaders who incite violence, persecution, and wars, and then justify their actions with religion.
religion is a much more convenient tool. It is, and that's why it *looks* like it's the cause of the violence, and it gets blamed for more than its share.
you can find examples of various Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, etc. communities who have been more or less tolerant, even accepting and dialogging, with other faith communities living with them.
For every example of that, there's probably more examples of the opposite.
There's a good reason for that.It has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with political power. Basically, the violent groups outnumber the peaceful groups. This has nothing to do with religion -- both sides use the same scriptures and practices; they are ostensibly practicing the same religion, except they both say that the other side is wrong -- and has everything to do with the persecution and war waged by the powerful elite. The violent religious practitioners always end up killing, converting, or out-populating the peaceful practitioners, so after a short time, they are in the majority. But when you look at the founders of the religions, they are peaceful, and the first adherents of their teachings are peaceful. Mohammed is a different case; I'll get to him later. But if you think that Mohammed is evidence that religion is inherently violent, you have examples of Christ, Buddha, and Guru Nanak (amongst other founders of less populous religions), who are examples against religion being inherently violent. Three good examples against one, in this case.
So I say that points more to government and the power-elite as the source of violence, rather than anything inherent in religion. The Sikhs and Jains are good examples of modern religious communities that are almost universally non-violent.
After all, in many Islamic countries, it's illegal (and sometimes punishable by death) to convert from Islam to a different religion.
I think that any time you find 'religious persecution', it's actually political domination from leaders who use religious ideas as a cover, to get the common folk riled up and do the dirty work of the actual persecution.
Probably, but this again just shows how abhorrent and dangerous religion itself is.
I think this points more to the abhorrence and dangers of government and political power, more than religion itself. I'm sticking with the claim that it's political leaders, the power elite, both in the church hierarchy and government, who actually introduce the danger and violence amongst the people, using religion as a cover and a justification.
In logic, a causes b if and only if b is immediately preceded by onlyb. That's a causal relationship. If you are claiming that religion *causes* violence, we see violence without religion, so religion cannot be the sole cause of violence. The other case where we see violence is in politics. So it could be that both religion and politics cause violence. But I argue that it is politics and power that causes the violence, using religion as a cover. I think Marx got it dead on when he claimed that institutional religions were an opiate for the masses, and provided justification for the power elite to fool the people and play their violent domination and power games. Whereas the founders of the religion are typically peaceful, and go *against* the violent, politically powerful religious institutions of their day.
For every passage about compassion and love there's one teaching intolerance and hate. Read the Bible some time; there's countless teachings advocating mass murder, rape, slavery and more.
I've read the Bible and I think your ratio is way off. If you take the example of Christ in the new testament, people make a lot of hay about Christ saying "I bring not peace, but a sword", but for that one supposedly violent passage, there are dozens of turn the other cheek, pray for those who persecute you, forgive people, give a man the coat off your back, the Good Samaritan, etc. Even the passage about a sword is up for debate -- it could mean just that the resu
Wherever you go with the definition, what about using the TCP/IP protocol as the starting point? Wasn't the TCP/IP the protocol that implemented the idea of a routing protocol that would withstand nuclear war?
It's not just the US where the One True Path idea is prevalent; that's the case everywhere where religion is strong. It's a central tenet of Islam, after all. And it's a central tenet of Christianity too; remember, Jesus himself said "there is no way to God except through me". Regardless of what you find or don't find in scripture, or what different interpretations various religions give to their scriptures and teachings, you can find examples of various Christian, Muslim, HIndu, Buddhist, Jain, etc. communities who have been more or less tolerant, even accepting and dialogging, with other faith communities living with them. Usually the more tolerant groups emphasize other teachings, or have wider interpretations of, for example, what Christ actually meant when he said "No one comes to the Father but through Me" -- i.e. that the true Christ is more universal or cosmic than what others might conceive of him. The prophet Mohammed taught his followers to be tolerant of Christians and Jews living among them, because they were people "of the book" -- they followed the Holy revealed scriptures of the Abrahamic God.
I think that any time you find 'religious persecution', it's actually political domination from leaders who use religious ideas as a cover, to get the common folk riled up and do the dirty work of the actual persecution.
... They are missing out on the true (if horrific) meaning of their religion A lot of those people would say that the dogmatists are the corruption of the true teachings of the religion, which teach compassion and love for your fellow man, which is what they try to practice.
...but otherwise didn't think about their religion much or learn much about it. There are those who just do what they've always done, and are not serious about religion. But my friends in Finland, at least, attend church for major ceremonies and holidays, but are otherwise independent, yet still serious, about their religious practice -- they still pray, believe in God and Christ, etc. They just don't see the need to rely on the church institution to do so. I think the Catholic church is more dogmatic about the need to rely on the Catholic church as the connection to God; the protestant churches are less so. The vast majority of Finns are Lutheran.
It goes both ways. Dogmatic religion practitioners says that theirs is the true way; the spiritual people say that theirs is actual what God or whoever asked us to do. After all, Christ never asked us to go to Church; instead he taught his followers to wander, following him. There's no record of him in the temple after he began his ministry.
Considering that Europe is, in general, less religious than the US, I'm surprised they still have laws like that there. I would chalk it up to the fact that in the US, a good chunk of the religion get adherents by explicitly claiming that their way is the One True Path, while those other guys, if not outright satanic, are at best misguided, and subscribing to their beliefs and practices are sure to lead to eternal damnation.
If you take away the ability to say that, you take away much of the sales pitch of religions here in the US.
Europeans may not be 'religious', as in attending church and patronizing religious institutions, but I bet that a good chuck of them are spiritual in the sense that they may believe in God, pray, believe in a higher power, etc. -- not totally materialist atheists. At least that's the case with a lot of people I know in Finland. They only patronize the church for baptisms, weddings, funerals, Christmas and Easter,if that, and perhaps pay the 1% voluntary church tax, but otherwise aren't the rabid Jesus freaks that you find here in the US. And they believe in God, Jesus, pray, etc.
Ok then why is slashdot promoting it to a story? Or hell why is it promoted to a front page story? It's a major event but it's not what expect from slashdot. Yeah! Let's get back to dupes and poorly-worded, inaccurate, misspelled, linkless, informationless, grammatically ambiguous summaries! You know, the good old days.
"They kind of live an a reverse world -- it was responsive, representative government that *provided* American infrastructure, instead of preventing it.
Four words: Transcontinental railroad. You lose."
You missed the part about electricity, sewers, and roadways.
As far as private investors, aren't they the ones that gave us the S&L crisis of the 80s? Wasn't that the Enron company that was scamming the electricity market of several states and cooking their books? If you're looking for more accountability, reliability, and efficiency than a democratic republic, private industry is the wrong place to look.
Also note that the idea of the salamander, back in the day, stemming from medieval Europe, was more of a mythical beast, like a small creature in the dragon family. Very different from our modern idea of the harmless amphibian. See the mythology section of the wikipedia article.
So a salamander was a monster, and a Gerry-mander was a monstrous institution.
"Practically everything that was said regarding Iraq's WMD prowess was also said by
George Bush
John McCain
John Kerry
Bill Clinton
Hillary Clinton
Robert Byrd
Sandy "nothing in my underpants" Berger
Madeline "Kim Jung Ill seems a nice guy" Albright
Carl Levin
Ted Fscking Kennedy
Al Gore and a HOST of others..."
Yes, because the Bush team coerced the CIA to cook up false intelligence and cherry-picked data. What do you expect when the Bush team told them outright lies? You expect Senators to question the findings and reports of the CIA?
The Senate does not have their own independent intelligence network. They relied on the lies that Bush fed them and the rest of the country. The Bush administration is solely to blame here.
I think libertarians are just naive. American libertarians live in a system where we have incredible infrastructure provided by government interference in the marketplace. Our roads and highways, our sewers, our electricity, our building codes -- everything. They love to complain that government is just an interference. They kind of live an a reverse world -- it was responsive, representative government that *provided* American infrastructure, instead of preventing it.
I've spent some time in South America where governments are basically the corrupt scams that libertarians claim the American government is. There is almost no infrastructure to speak of in most of the country. Bridges get built and promptly collapse. Roads wash away in the first rain or mudslide. In the jungle, there is no protection of law. A guy could shoot you for looking at his daughter the wrong way. Who would do anything about it? You had it coming to you.
If libertarians ever got their agenda implemented in the US, we would be ruled by gangsters and warlords. If any libertarian is going to say that government is nothing but warlords, I challenge them to go live in Somalia, Afghanistan, or South America, where political power is routinely seized in military coups or simple. Here in the US, we have peaceful political revolutions every 2, 4, and 6 years where minority political parties get gain power *without* violence.
"The American political system was not built for parties... the founders where very weary of parties"
The American political system, however unintentionally, was de facto built for two parties. However weary the founder were of parties, they did institute a system that creates the perfect environment for two parties. It's the natural outcome when you combine a simple-majority, winner-take-all system with human nature. People naturally form groups of all kinds. You can't prevent political parties from forming without throwing out our rights of free speech and free association. Because a simple-majority election means that any 3rd party candidate is a throw-away vote, we now have a 2 party system.
If we want more than two parties, we have to adopt one of the electoral systems found elsewhere in the world, where 3rd parties have actually won seats. If we want no parties, well, we have to think of a new system and try it out, see if it works. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The problem is that our simple-majority, winner-take-all electoral system pretty much guarantees that there will only be two parties. If you were interested in seeing a conservative agenda in 1992, and you voted for Ross Perot, it was almost as bad as voting for Clinton. There was no way that Ross Perot could get enough votes to win, and all you were doing was taking your vote away from Bush Sr., who would more likely govern the way you'd want to see. The same thing happened with Ralph Nader voters in 2000. All they accomplished was taking their vote away from Gore, who was more likely to govern the way they would want. Instead, they ended up giving the election to Bush.
To really have a system where third parties actually stand a chance of winning, and people don't feel like they're throwing their vote away, we need a different electoral system. I don't know which specific system would work best, but it can't be our simple majority system. Our 250+ years of history shows that.
As a native Ohioan who has friends who went to OU, I always wonder why OU's filesharing activities get picked up by the media. OU is in the middle of BFE and there is absolutely nothing to do out there besides drink yourself stupid, but that is the situation with a lot of universities ( at least in Ohio ).
I remember back in the late 90s there was an NPR piece about filesharing at OU (might have been Berlin, I'm not sure). Is this the genesis of the OU filesharing media meme?
I would like to see Thunderbird have automatic folder creation. Thunderbird supports folders based on saved searches. I think Thunderbird could automatically create dynamic folders based on my contacts, common *popular* strings in subject lines ( this would cover most mailing lists ), conversations ala gmail, yesterday, today, last week, etc ( Yes, I know Thunderbird already has this capability, but I would like to see it in the folder navigation pane). What do you say, Thunderbird community?
"(editing a person's name is awkward, as typing a first and last name may actually require you to edit *three* fields - go figure.)"
I think this may be about maintaining horizontal compatability with other address books -- some have two or three fields for the name, while others just have a single field. So, to cover all the bases, Thunderbird does does all the options.
He probably doesn't mean 'built-in', but just a standard GUI with all of the widgets they're using coming along with it.
But that being said, that will never happen; they need to just pick on of the most common ones, make sure the licenses are okay, and tell users that their package depends on it. Hopefully they won't have to help users install a widget package.
Am I wrong in thinking that the major choice comes down to GNOME or KDE?
"Couple hundred years ago, draining blood was considered a cure for just about anything. Lets bring it back. Next time you have a headache, slit your wrists."
In my medical history class, we learned about an experiment that tested the benefits of bleeding. Bleeding was often prescribed for fevers, because they thought that you had too much blood in your system. It turns out that bleeding does reduce fevers. Remember, if are running to high a fever, it can easily kill you or cause permanent brain damage. It might be an acceptable response to a dramatic situation. In the olden days, people could be in fever for days or even weeks. They didn't have anti-biotics. All they had was a cool compress to put on your forehead, to keep your brain from being cooked alive.
"God, you "all natural" medicine freaks are about as bad as those Scientologist."
Some natural cures are bogus, some are smashing successes. I don't think you'll find many serious 'natural medicine' types who advocate abandoning the scientific method. Andrew Weil says that if you get in a car accident and your arm is dangling by a thread, the last person you want to see is an herbalist.
Note that many of our pharmaceutical drugs were based on plant medicines. The Indians of the Amazon used Chincona bark to cure all kinds of fevers, including malarial fevers. It turns out that the quinine in the bark reduces fevers, and also kills the malaria plasmodium. So it's good for any kind of fever, and especially good for malaria fevers. For some 400 years, until quinine was synthesized in 1944, cinchona bark was the source for all quinine treaments in Europe, from bark teas to pill form. Wikipedia claims that cinchona bark is still the most economical source of quinine, above synthesized quinine.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if we took away all the excuses they currently use -- religion, nationalism, ethnicity, race -- they would find new ones. Why not go after the actual source of the evil, instead of just one of their propaganda cover stories?
You are right, but we have plenty of evidence of malfeasance and election fraud.
... all enlisted by Republicans to create a program which could guarantee Bush's presidential election victory"
" Clinton Eugene Curtis, A former programmer for NASA and Exxon has finally come forward to testify before the US Judiciary that he was
Add to that the fact that your 'working-stiff' programmer actually wants to get the job done and not have to fix all kinds of crazy bugs in crappy, old, deprecated software, it looks more like it was a deliberate choice to use Jet, and it was not for reasons of creating secure, accurate elections.
If you wanted to make an insecure system that was easy to hack and manipulate, didn't have basic security features, data integrity, and no audit trail, and thus no record of how data was altered outside of specifications, you might use such a deprecated application.
you can find examples of various Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, etc. communities who have been more or less tolerant, even accepting and dialogging, with other faith communities living with them.
For every example of that, there's probably more examples of the opposite.
There's a good reason for that.It has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with political power. Basically, the violent groups outnumber the peaceful groups. This has nothing to do with religion -- both sides use the same scriptures and practices; they are ostensibly practicing the same religion, except they both say that the other side is wrong -- and has everything to do with the persecution and war waged by the powerful elite. The violent religious practitioners always end up killing, converting, or out-populating the peaceful practitioners, so after a short time, they are in the majority. But when you look at the founders of the religions, they are peaceful, and the first adherents of their teachings are peaceful. Mohammed is a different case; I'll get to him later. But if you think that Mohammed is evidence that religion is inherently violent, you have examples of Christ, Buddha, and Guru Nanak (amongst other founders of less populous religions), who are examples against religion being inherently violent. Three good examples against one, in this case.
So I say that points more to government and the power-elite as the source of violence, rather than anything inherent in religion. The Sikhs and Jains are good examples of modern religious communities that are almost universally non-violent.
After all, in many Islamic countries, it's illegal (and sometimes punishable by death) to convert from Islam to a different religion.
I think that any time you find 'religious persecution', it's actually political domination from leaders who use religious ideas as a cover, to get the common folk riled up and do the dirty work of the actual persecution.
Probably, but this again just shows how abhorrent and dangerous religion itself is.
I think this points more to the abhorrence and dangers of government and political power, more than religion itself. I'm sticking with the claim that it's political leaders, the power elite, both in the church hierarchy and government, who actually introduce the danger and violence amongst the people, using religion as a cover and a justification. In logic, a causes b if and only if b is immediately preceded by only b. That's a causal relationship. If you are claiming that religion *causes* violence, we see violence without religion, so religion cannot be the sole cause of violence. The other case where we see violence is in politics. So it could be that both religion and politics cause violence. But I argue that it is politics and power that causes the violence, using religion as a cover. I think Marx got it dead on when he claimed that institutional religions were an opiate for the masses, and provided justification for the power elite to fool the people and play their violent domination and power games. Whereas the founders of the religion are typically peaceful, and go *against* the violent, politically powerful religious institutions of their day.
For every passage about compassion and love there's one teaching intolerance and hate. Read the Bible some time; there's countless teachings advocating mass murder, rape, slavery and more.
I've read the Bible and I think your ratio is way off. If you take the example of Christ in the new testament, people make a lot of hay about Christ saying "I bring not peace, but a sword", but for that one supposedly violent passage, there are dozens of turn the other cheek, pray for those who persecute you, forgive people, give a man the coat off your back, the Good Samaritan, etc. Even the passage about a sword is up for debate -- it could mean just that the resu
Wherever you go with the definition, what about using the TCP/IP protocol as the starting point? Wasn't the TCP/IP the protocol that implemented the idea of a routing protocol that would withstand nuclear war?
I think that any time you find 'religious persecution', it's actually political domination from leaders who use religious ideas as a cover, to get the common folk riled up and do the dirty work of the actual persecution.
... They are missing out on the true (if horrific) meaning of their religion A lot of those people would say that the dogmatists are the corruption of the true teachings of the religion, which teach compassion and love for your fellow man, which is what they try to practice.It goes both ways. Dogmatic religion practitioners says that theirs is the true way; the spiritual people say that theirs is actual what God or whoever asked us to do. After all, Christ never asked us to go to Church; instead he taught his followers to wander, following him. There's no record of him in the temple after he began his ministry.
It wasn't submitted as a story, but rather it was a journal entry that made it to the main page. I guess that happened via the firehose.
If you take away the ability to say that, you take away much of the sales pitch of religions here in the US.
Europeans may not be 'religious', as in attending church and patronizing religious institutions, but I bet that a good chuck of them are spiritual in the sense that they may believe in God, pray, believe in a higher power, etc. -- not totally materialist atheists. At least that's the case with a lot of people I know in Finland. They only patronize the church for baptisms, weddings, funerals, Christmas and Easter,if that, and perhaps pay the 1% voluntary church tax, but otherwise aren't the rabid Jesus freaks that you find here in the US. And they believe in God, Jesus, pray, etc.
"They kind of live an a reverse world -- it was responsive, representative government that *provided* American infrastructure, instead of preventing it.
Four words: Transcontinental railroad. You lose."
You missed the part about electricity, sewers, and roadways.
As far as private investors, aren't they the ones that gave us the S&L crisis of the 80s? Wasn't that the Enron company that was scamming the electricity market of several states and cooking their books? If you're looking for more accountability, reliability, and efficiency than a democratic republic, private industry is the wrong place to look.
"So why is slashdot writting about it? "
This was a journal entry.
Thank you, sir. You have allowed me to re-examine my position.
Also note that the idea of the salamander, back in the day, stemming from medieval Europe, was more of a mythical beast, like a small creature in the dragon family. Very different from our modern idea of the harmless amphibian. See the mythology section of the wikipedia article.
So a salamander was a monster, and a Gerry-mander was a monstrous institution.
What are these quotes? Can you give me a source?
"Practically everything that was said regarding Iraq's WMD prowess was also said by
George Bush
John McCain
John Kerry
Bill Clinton
Hillary Clinton
Robert Byrd
Sandy "nothing in my underpants" Berger
Madeline "Kim Jung Ill seems a nice guy" Albright
Carl Levin
Ted Fscking Kennedy
Al Gore and a HOST of others..."
Yes, because the Bush team coerced the CIA to cook up false intelligence and cherry-picked data. What do you expect when the Bush team told them outright lies? You expect Senators to question the findings and reports of the CIA?
The Senate does not have their own independent intelligence network. They relied on the lies that Bush fed them and the rest of the country. The Bush administration is solely to blame here.
I think libertarians are just naive. American libertarians live in a system where we have incredible infrastructure provided by government interference in the marketplace. Our roads and highways, our sewers, our electricity, our building codes -- everything. They love to complain that government is just an interference. They kind of live an a reverse world -- it was responsive, representative government that *provided* American infrastructure, instead of preventing it.
I've spent some time in South America where governments are basically the corrupt scams that libertarians claim the American government is. There is almost no infrastructure to speak of in most of the country. Bridges get built and promptly collapse. Roads wash away in the first rain or mudslide. In the jungle, there is no protection of law. A guy could shoot you for looking at his daughter the wrong way. Who would do anything about it? You had it coming to you.
If libertarians ever got their agenda implemented in the US, we would be ruled by gangsters and warlords. If any libertarian is going to say that government is nothing but warlords, I challenge them to go live in Somalia, Afghanistan, or South America, where political power is routinely seized in military coups or simple. Here in the US, we have peaceful political revolutions every 2, 4, and 6 years where minority political parties get gain power *without* violence.
"The American political system was not built for parties... the founders where very weary of parties"
The American political system, however unintentionally, was de facto built for two parties. However weary the founder were of parties, they did institute a system that creates the perfect environment for two parties. It's the natural outcome when you combine a simple-majority, winner-take-all system with human nature. People naturally form groups of all kinds. You can't prevent political parties from forming without throwing out our rights of free speech and free association. Because a simple-majority election means that any 3rd party candidate is a throw-away vote, we now have a 2 party system.
If we want more than two parties, we have to adopt one of the electoral systems found elsewhere in the world, where 3rd parties have actually won seats. If we want no parties, well, we have to think of a new system and try it out, see if it works. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The problem is that our simple-majority, winner-take-all electoral system pretty much guarantees that there will only be two parties. If you were interested in seeing a conservative agenda in 1992, and you voted for Ross Perot, it was almost as bad as voting for Clinton. There was no way that Ross Perot could get enough votes to win, and all you were doing was taking your vote away from Bush Sr., who would more likely govern the way you'd want to see. The same thing happened with Ralph Nader voters in 2000. All they accomplished was taking their vote away from Gore, who was more likely to govern the way they would want. Instead, they ended up giving the election to Bush.
To really have a system where third parties actually stand a chance of winning, and people don't feel like they're throwing their vote away, we need a different electoral system. I don't know which specific system would work best, but it can't be our simple majority system. Our 250+ years of history shows that.
As a native Ohioan who has friends who went to OU, I always wonder why OU's filesharing activities get picked up by the media. OU is in the middle of BFE and there is absolutely nothing to do out there besides drink yourself stupid, but that is the situation with a lot of universities ( at least in Ohio ).
I remember back in the late 90s there was an NPR piece about filesharing at OU (might have been Berlin, I'm not sure). Is this the genesis of the OU filesharing media meme?
I would like to see Thunderbird have automatic folder creation. Thunderbird supports folders based on saved searches. I think Thunderbird could automatically create dynamic folders based on my contacts, common *popular* strings in subject lines ( this would cover most mailing lists ), conversations ala gmail, yesterday, today, last week, etc ( Yes, I know Thunderbird already has this capability, but I would like to see it in the folder navigation pane). What do you say, Thunderbird community?
"(editing a person's name is awkward, as typing a first and last name may actually require you to edit *three* fields - go figure.)"
I think this may be about maintaining horizontal compatability with other address books -- some have two or three fields for the name, while others just have a single field. So, to cover all the bases, Thunderbird does does all the options.
"Either that or we'll start seeing Wikipedia salesmen going door to door."
I have the perfect guy for you.
He probably doesn't mean 'built-in', but just a standard GUI with all of the widgets they're using coming along with it.
But that being said, that will never happen; they need to just pick on of the most common ones, make sure the licenses are okay, and tell users that their package depends on it. Hopefully they won't have to help users install a widget package.
Am I wrong in thinking that the major choice comes down to GNOME or KDE?
"Couple hundred years ago, draining blood was considered a cure for just about anything. Lets bring it back. Next time you have a headache, slit your wrists."
In my medical history class, we learned about an experiment that tested the benefits of bleeding. Bleeding was often prescribed for fevers, because they thought that you had too much blood in your system. It turns out that bleeding does reduce fevers. Remember, if are running to high a fever, it can easily kill you or cause permanent brain damage. It might be an acceptable response to a dramatic situation. In the olden days, people could be in fever for days or even weeks. They didn't have anti-biotics. All they had was a cool compress to put on your forehead, to keep your brain from being cooked alive.
"God, you "all natural" medicine freaks are about as bad as those Scientologist."
Some natural cures are bogus, some are smashing successes. I don't think you'll find many serious 'natural medicine' types who advocate abandoning the scientific method. Andrew Weil says that if you get in a car accident and your arm is dangling by a thread, the last person you want to see is an herbalist.
Note that many of our pharmaceutical drugs were based on plant medicines. The Indians of the Amazon used Chincona bark to cure all kinds of fevers, including malarial fevers. It turns out that the quinine in the bark reduces fevers, and also kills the malaria plasmodium. So it's good for any kind of fever, and especially good for malaria fevers. For some 400 years, until quinine was synthesized in 1944, cinchona bark was the source for all quinine treaments in Europe, from bark teas to pill form. Wikipedia claims that cinchona bark is still the most economical source of quinine, above synthesized quinine.