hey nifty, we can now get a Mormon perspective in too. (I got the reference to the Pearl of Great Price, yes I have some background in your faith, and to this day if a couple of 'elders' stop by I'll gladly invite them in for good conversation.). Here's a challenge for you though since you reference Adam and creation, I know that in Mormon doctrine, at least in the main LDS branch, you believe, in accordance with what Brigham Young taught, and from some references to books like those in the PoGP, that God the father was originally a man who had his own "god" and was elevated to godhood by his devotion. Similarly, those who make it to the celestial kingdom will in turn become gods continuing the chain. Question though, where did it begin? If God had a God, what God did that God have? Ultimately wouldn't there have to be one supreme Deity (unbound by the limitations of time and matter, else matter, not deity would be what's primeval.) starting the whole thing, shouldn't we all just be serving and worshipping him?
hi, though we will obviously disagree and I am saying this in a friendly light (I hope;-), what would you say about the question of original sin then? I mean, if Christianity teaches that Christ's atonement was to free man from the bondage of Adam's sin, (again I using a traditional Christian reference point, not my own), what does that mean for other worlds? I.e., do you believe that say x amount of other beings on other worlds are out there, every one of their first parents made a huge cosmic mistake by taking their own forbidden fruit, and thus would all need salvation? If not, would they then be all free from sin and NOT need Christ to save them? I realize one can understand these traditional concepts rather more metaphysically perhaps, but it does (at least I think it does), throw accepted Christian tradition in a whirl.
Well if religion's brought up, I feel I must chime in with my islamic 2 dinars. As to the problem from a Christian perspective, which I for obvious reasons don't share though (raised Catholic mind you, and my Dad's a minister currently), what I wonder would be what does that say about Christ being God's unique son, whose atoning sacrifice is supposed to save humanity? What about all the other supposed species of beings out there who probably have not heard of Jesus? Are they all damned? Why would God only send his "son" down to one species. If one then thinks "well maybe He incarnated amongst them too" that definately throws the Christian doctrine in bind, about Jesus being unique and all, and rather relativizes the whole thing. Plus, multi incarnations (reincarnations?) definately seems to be drifting far out of accepted Christian orthodoxy.
Anyway, that's your faith, I can only really comment best on mine. I'm a shia muslim, and in the corpus of our traditions, there are a number of references to there being many other Adams out there, other worlds with living beings. Like one that goes something like (don;t have the exact reference in front of me, Im at work;-) The imam (for us shias, one of the twelve successors of the Prophet Muhammad) says something like: Do you think yours is the only Adam God has created, rather, He has created thousands upon thousands of other Adams, and yours is but the last.
There are other traditions like this, and the Quran does mention a plurality of worlds. Since we don't believe in the Christian paradigms, original sin, Christ being the incarnation and son (we believe in him as a human prophet, not a god-man), the atonement through crucifixion, etc., these concerns wouldn't really affect our theology.
That said, I'm not holding my breadth for us to soon, or even ever, make contact through means of technology. The universe is a mighty big place, our galaxy being only one many many more. Add to that, the enormity of the ages since it was created, who knows where or even when to look for other beings as us or otherwise? But as we say, God knows best....
That is frickin' cool, I just checked out their site. Does it really work? x86 and sparc? Also, what version of solaris do you have to be running? 8, 9, both?
Yeah, we used that acronym for the OSI layer names too. Actually I graduated about a year ago, and never went further with the CCNA stuff beyond the first course. It was required for all of us, I went on afterwards to the MS Win2k track instead. Then, graduated, doing... Linux tech support for a major Unix company. Weird eh? (but I'm thankful to God for it)
That said, I would be interested in eventually learning more of it on my own now, the Cisco stuff. At the time, it seemed to me the whole academy/college connection with cisco seemed rather dubious. I mean really, how many CCNAs does the world really need? (I'm referring to people who know Cisco, but ONLY know Cisco, and nothing else. Knowing it in accompaniment with other skills is a good thing).
that's funny. Like I mentioned in another post, I just finished installing on my home box about an hour ago or so. Like you however, I'm doing it at work. My 56k dialup just can't compete with what they have here.
(in case your not using it, check out dag wieer's apt repository, very nice, and it cross links with others such as freshrpms.)
Not mentioned here also might be setting your drives in BIOS to use LBA, instead of Auto, which rather makes sense anyhow.
After having SUSE 9.1 miff up my windows partition for me (yet another reason to sour that distro in my taste), installing Fedora Core 2, just a few minutes ago, no problems here. that is, in combination with following the steps above.
Nifty timing, since I just finished installing Core 2 on my box a few minutes ago. Not much in the article that informed me as such though.
I seem to notice an emerging pattern with Fedora releases though. RCs, avoid them all, they won't work properly, unless you really do want to do bug testing (not a bad thing). Final releases, avoid them too, at least for about a month or so. Let the updates filter in, and then you should be good. Plus, that gives a good amount of time for the 3rd party apt/yum repositories to starting filling up, which they seem to be doing rather nicely lately (though of course not on a par with debian, but good none the less).
good to see somebody doing this. I took the first semester Cisco course at my college, and yeah, the books weren't all that good. I haven't seen his work yet, but I do recall the first semester is exclusively going over the seven layers of the OSI model in sometimes painful detail. Can tend to throw the beginning student off, especially considering the OSI model is not much more than an academic tool anyway, TCP/IP is were its at in the 'real world'.
Yeah, read the WP article earlier off of Google news. What really got me about it though was this fellow's supposed to be a tech writer. I have no problem with someone making a reasoned critique of Linux distros and such. However, I got the impression this article was rather thrown together, I mean really, using LiveCD SUSE as a test example? Come on, a tech writer who gets thrown in a whack because one of the DEs, KDE, uses single click instead of double? And who complains about having (he doesn't seem to be aware of niceties like synaptic mind you) to actually use commands to install something? Like others have mentioned, what the heck was this guy using in the 80s anyway? (LOAD "*", 8, 1 and we liked it!)
Have to second the Debian idea. I'm not a Debian troll by the way (maybe a zealot though;-) I've used plenty of different distros in my Linux career. What's really got me back with Debian though now, is the beta installer they've been working on for Sarge, the thing is just sweet, takes most of the pain out of Debian. Add to that that Sarge has really become quite up to date, with the Debian sensitity to stability mixed in. (Woody really is way too old, and though sid seems to work for many, sarge doesn't lag far behind though with that extra good feeling of "it's tested I can feel safe").
Point in case, right now I'm writing this from a Debian sarge box, with 2.6 installed, Nvidia drivers working fine, no XP dual boot issues (I am running XP, on the same drive, using Grub, no problems and haven't heard of any other Debian users experiencing these woes. 2.6 runs great on this, which is a relief as I'd begun to think that perhaps Linux was starting to suck), partitioned with XFS, with good stable software which is not archaic date wise, gnome 2.4, xfree 4.3, kde 3.2, xfce4. etc...
As a final point, though this is totally subjective, for some odd reason using Debian makes me feel better about it all, on the social conscience level that is. Can't totally put my finger on it, but Debian GNU/Linux (nice how they use the term, though no I'm not a FSF fanatic) seems to be about the truest out there to the sometimes utopian ideals of community-centered, totally non-corporate, free as in free, and free, software, and all that, that makes Linux rather special.
I remember reading this review of RH 9, and I wish we could see more reviews of this caliber. Ones that actually go into architectural and technical differences, not just if the colour scheme of the installer was good or not.
http://www.gurulabs.com/RedHatLinux9-review.html
Umm, no, you need to study a bit more. Shariah as a set of laws is quite comprehensive and matters of ownership and property, trade laws, etc., certainly do fall in its parameters. What you see in places like Afghanistan under the Taleban are semi literate tribespeople who only know custom and a rather cusory understanding on some aspects on the penal codes, who then like to proclaim its Islamic law. As examples to prove my point that the Islamic Shariah is very a fully workable and comprehensive canon to govern us, just look at the volumnous works of our scholars, on aspects ranging from logic, jurisprudential principles, canonical sources, etc. Except in the rare cases of genius, the average period of time it takes to complete the full gamut of howza studies is around 20 years, after which if you've completed it, and proven yourself, you are considered capable of ijtehad. Mind you, that's why our most senior scholars tend to be rather senior, 50 years old is still considered junior for how long it really takes.
Mind you, I should mention I'm referring to the Shia tradition, of which I am a part of. The system as you would see in predominantly Sunni Egypt will differ, though I cannot claim expertise on that.
As to the hand cutting thing. That's pretty shallow. What it really is, regardless of what the ignorant who claim to invoke Shariah may think, is that under a number of rather strict circumstances, ie amount stolen, that it not be out of poverty, and other matters detailed in law books, if all that is proven, then the punishment is the amputation of the four fingers (excluding the thumb). Sure that may sound harsh to many ears, but the point is not to go around cutting people up, but to prevent the crime from happening, using enough measure (coupled with appropriate balancing of justice and mercy).
Good point about the Egyptian dictatorship. Mubarak and his cronies (as well as Sadat and Nasser) are certainly not representative of Islamic principles. But as can be seen in things like the arrests/assasinations of groups like the Ikhwan are indeed its opponents.
Oh and in the odd (and admittedly remote) chance that the Egyptian fascist intellegencia read this and get the idea that linux could be subversive to them, I don't live in Egypt. This is a Canadian telling you to fuck off and die.
Interesting comment, as someone whose actually studied the shariah (though of course not gone nearly as deep as one may) and for whom Islamic studies was my mainstay before entering the IT world (I still consider it the most important thing out there, and paramount to my life, though I have to confess to dedicating an obscene amount of time to my current passion, after all it is my living).
I myself have wondered about how close GPL-like thought can come into with traditional Islamic iqtisadi (roughly economic) thought. As you may konw many of the scholars (with some prominent exceptions) have rejected the concept of intellectual property, coupled with the fact that hoarding is considered a heinous sin. The idea of distributing source for the public benifit certainly seems in tune with the general Islamic ethos, though I don't know if I'd say that cancels out all closed models of software development as well (Allahu 'alam).
I have given thought to the notion that Linux and other free systems is just what the Muslim nations could use right now to help bring back some of the intellectual heritage and scientific innovation that had been a hallmark in former times (not that it's dead by any means, just looks at Safawid and post Safawid metaphysics in Iran to disprove the idea that Islamic philosophy died with Ibn Rushd.) Certainly a system that Muslims can actively contribute to and make their own would be much better than just sending in checks to a closed business located in Redmond.
wa salaam 'ala 'l-muhtadeen...
Correct I probably would not have thought twice. But then, if it showed Tux waiving the flag of the Third Reich, or Sig Heiling the Fuhrer, you and others would likely not think it so innocent. It's the politics of what that Israeli flag mean that miff be like me so much. (disposition of thousands if not millions, illegal assasinations, house demolitions and razings on property, racist apartheid-like segregations, etc.)
Woops! So much for posting AC dag nab it. Oh well, now you all know, I'm a raving 100% thouroughly zealous anti-Zionist. There, I said it. Now onto other things...
Posting AC because I know this will be shot down as a troll, however, something I've wondered about is what is the deal with all the Jews/Israelis involved in Gentoo development? Was this a conscious decision on the part on Daniel to have as many Jews involved or what? The first thing that threw me off from Gentoo was that KDE guy, Dan Arnak, having the Israeli flag on the Gentoo site. Then, reading some posts he made about Palestinians and such (basically he's a raving Zionist) really turned me away from this distro. I can't support a distro whose founding heads spew off such garbage. (Not meaning that I have to agree with everything they say, but there is a limit I can't in good conscience cross and the Zionist thing is one of them particularly if their advertising this nonsense on their homesite. Not to mention I have plenty of non-political technical reasons to dislike this one, but it was the politics that really turned me off).
Have to agree with what a number of people are saying here. As much as I like computers, and libraries, I'm not sure I really favour so much the current combination of them that we're seeing. Often, I've noticed they are not being used for research, and the people using them are not actually getting books out. Rather, you have 12 year olds going on yahoo chat, trying to sneak some porn, look up the latest on Britney, or other such activities. Libraries are for books, and consequently to increase literacy amongst the public. This does not seem to further that goal. Not to mention that things like this, and videos for instance, do eat away at libraries funds, both for connection and computer costs, and also because libraries sometimes need an extra staff person to monitor what's going on there. (Though in all fairness, I have used the internet in libraries before, it was helpful for me when I didn't have it at home and I can only think that there are others out there who are also using the system in a good way, and yes, I have quite often borrowed movies from the libraries (great when you have kids)).
Oh and the point someone mentioned about comp books in libraries being hopelessly out of date. Yes it can be pretty bad, plus, do they really need yet another book on their shelf on how to use Office?
I wonder if the annoyance factor about only hearing half the conversation is that people perhaps like to eavesdrop on others conversations. Hearing only half of it becomes annoying as you can't fully make out what's being said...just a thought.
But yeah, I hate the things too, don't own one, don't know if I will. Hard to think I'm technophobic, when technology is my line of work, but sometimes seeing somebody walk down a hall seemingly talking to themself kind of strike me as odd. What really surprised me when I started working where I do, is the amount of people of who carry on conversations on them...in the freaking bathroom, sometimes while the work is in progress, if you follow. Man, that's just bad (sort of like not washing your hands after you're done. sorry, that's just disgusting; please do not shake my hand, nor touch my food.)
Indeed it was. Actually I had a pretty good run there, and like I said, nothing to complain about now. But that first course was a bit of a joke content wise. And like I said, I was rather sceptical of the place of Cisco in the school curicula. Now though, I have been seriously thinking of taking up a proper CS course load at a four year. (Yay I can learn useful things like LISP!/sarcasm)
Totally agree. Actually it's worse though. Few years back took my first college level computer course (Intro to computers). Was looking forward to what might be a nice little overview of the technologies, history, maybe a dash of programming thrown in, etc. Nope. I was (mainly) a course on how to use Microsoft Office 2000. Word, Access, Excel, Powerpoint. THAT's what people are being taught is computing now. Hence, the lady at my college who knew MS office pretty good was reffered to as a computer wiz. Sad, back when I went to high school and took the computer class back then, it was for programming BASIC on Commodore 64s. Anyhow, after that, the rest of the computer networking track I was on consisted either of taking the Cisco courses, or the MS Win2k admining ones. I went with MS. (one could complain about how so many schools are being duped into passing off these Cisco academy courses as well, creating a legion of rather useless, and unemployed CCNAs, I wonder how much Cisco is paying them... It's a good thing to know, the Cisco stuff, but when that's ALL you know, I wonder) Anyhow, long story short, the MS teacher I had was pretty good, and knew my interest in Linux. He gave me a good amount of room to explore that avenue, and the day after graduation started working in tech support for a major tech company doing linux server support.
So mines a happy story in the end, but as regards the situation you're mentioning with the homeschooling and all, I agree. Two little boys of my own, one about to be in grade 1. We're going to try the home route as well, especially after seeing how terrible the K level could be (I don't appreciate my son being brainwashed with historical lies and propaganda, turning kids not into better human beings, but better members of the machine. Especially at such a young age when he's not in a position to really critically analyze things. Yeah, that was really something to have my son come home after the sep11 observance class saying he and his friends want to become soldiers "because they help people", all the while a war of lies is building to attack another nation. We're Muslims by the way (convert myself).) Anyhow, best wishes for you and yours, hopefully things will work out better.
Interesting comment. This weekend I just went ahead and installed XP pro in my Windows partition, and though the guys at work (we're pretty thoroughgoing Linux people) would really be on my case for saying this, I have to admit I'm impressed. Not from a security standpoint, and all those neat features really don't have much of a place in the workplace, but as a nice OS to use at home, play games with, watch DVDs, etc., it really does the job nicely. Even on the development end, if for instance you're into Java, like I'm becoming, the platform becomes pretty irrelevant (theoretically). I'd still rather be using Linux at work, as I do, but for home, looks like this XP-thing will do nicely (just turn off all the stupid fisher-price skins stuff, and lock it down (to the extent possible) by turning off services and such (man, they have terminal services turned ON by default... shesh). I did have 2k installed previously here, but for what I'm using it for, looks like XP is a surprising improvement (even if only incrementally). Not that I'll be erasing my Linux home installs anytime soon (RH and Slack). Just my 2 cents.
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hey nifty, we can now get a Mormon perspective in too. (I got the reference to the Pearl of Great Price, yes I have some background in your faith, and to this day if a couple of 'elders' stop by I'll gladly invite them in for good conversation.). Here's a challenge for you though since you reference Adam and creation, I know that in Mormon doctrine, at least in the main LDS branch, you believe, in accordance with what Brigham Young taught, and from some references to books like those in the PoGP, that God the father was originally a man who had his own "god" and was elevated to godhood by his devotion. Similarly, those who make it to the celestial kingdom will in turn become gods continuing the chain. Question though, where did it begin? If God had a God, what God did that God have? Ultimately wouldn't there have to be one supreme Deity (unbound by the limitations of time and matter, else matter, not deity would be what's primeval.) starting the whole thing, shouldn't we all just be serving and worshipping him?
hi, though we will obviously disagree and I am saying this in a friendly light (I hope ;-), what would you say about the question of original sin then? I mean, if Christianity teaches that Christ's atonement was to free man from the bondage of Adam's sin, (again I using a traditional Christian reference point, not my own), what does that mean for other worlds? I.e., do you believe that say x amount of other beings on other worlds are out there, every one of their first parents made a huge cosmic mistake by taking their own forbidden fruit, and thus would all need salvation? If not, would they then be all free from sin and NOT need Christ to save them? I realize one can understand these traditional concepts rather more metaphysically perhaps, but it does (at least I think it does), throw accepted Christian tradition in a whirl.
Well if religion's brought up, I feel I must chime in with my islamic 2 dinars. As to the problem from a Christian perspective, which I for obvious reasons don't share though (raised Catholic mind you, and my Dad's a minister currently), what I wonder would be what does that say about Christ being God's unique son, whose atoning sacrifice is supposed to save humanity? What about all the other supposed species of beings out there who probably have not heard of Jesus? Are they all damned? Why would God only send his "son" down to one species. If one then thinks "well maybe He incarnated amongst them too" that definately throws the Christian doctrine in bind, about Jesus being unique and all, and rather relativizes the whole thing. Plus, multi incarnations (reincarnations?) definately seems to be drifting far out of accepted Christian orthodoxy.
;-) The imam (for us shias, one of the twelve successors of the Prophet Muhammad) says something like: Do you think yours is the only Adam God has created, rather, He has created thousands upon thousands of other Adams, and yours is but the last.
Anyway, that's your faith, I can only really comment best on mine. I'm a shia muslim, and in the corpus of our traditions, there are a number of references to there being many other Adams out there, other worlds with living beings. Like one that goes something like (don;t have the exact reference in front of me, Im at work
There are other traditions like this, and the Quran does mention a plurality of worlds. Since we don't believe in the Christian paradigms, original sin, Christ being the incarnation and son (we believe in him as a human prophet, not a god-man), the atonement through crucifixion, etc., these concerns wouldn't really affect our theology.
That said, I'm not holding my breadth for us to soon, or even ever, make contact through means of technology. The universe is a mighty big place, our galaxy being only one many many more. Add to that, the enormity of the ages since it was created, who knows where or even when to look for other beings as us or otherwise? But as we say, God knows best....
I did a ln -s /rp_source_dir/plugins/* /usr/lib/mozilla-1.7/plugins
sort of like a java plugin install. works great for me.
That is frickin' cool, I just checked out their site. Does it really work? x86 and sparc? Also, what version of solaris do you have to be running? 8, 9, both?
Yeah, we used that acronym for the OSI layer names too. Actually I graduated about a year ago, and never went further with the CCNA stuff beyond the first course. It was required for all of us, I went on afterwards to the MS Win2k track instead. Then, graduated, doing... Linux tech support for a major Unix company. Weird eh? (but I'm thankful to God for it)
That said, I would be interested in eventually learning more of it on my own now, the Cisco stuff. At the time, it seemed to me the whole academy/college connection with cisco seemed rather dubious. I mean really, how many CCNAs does the world really need? (I'm referring to people who know Cisco, but ONLY know Cisco, and nothing else. Knowing it in accompaniment with other skills is a good thing).
that's funny. Like I mentioned in another post, I just finished installing on my home box about an hour ago or so. Like you however, I'm doing it at work. My 56k dialup just can't compete with what they have here.
(in case your not using it, check out dag wieer's apt repository, very nice, and it cross links with others such as freshrpms.)
And here's the fix:
http://lwn.net/Articles/86835/
Not mentioned here also might be setting your drives in BIOS to use LBA, instead of Auto, which rather makes sense anyhow.
After having SUSE 9.1 miff up my windows partition for me (yet another reason to sour that distro in my taste), installing Fedora Core 2, just a few minutes ago, no problems here. that is, in combination with following the steps above.
Nifty timing, since I just finished installing Core 2 on my box a few minutes ago. Not much in the article that informed me as such though.
I seem to notice an emerging pattern with Fedora releases though. RCs, avoid them all, they won't work properly, unless you really do want to do bug testing (not a bad thing). Final releases, avoid them too, at least for about a month or so. Let the updates filter in, and then you should be good. Plus, that gives a good amount of time for the 3rd party apt/yum repositories to starting filling up, which they seem to be doing rather nicely lately (though of course not on a par with debian, but good none the less).
good to see somebody doing this. I took the first semester Cisco course at my college, and yeah, the books weren't all that good. I haven't seen his work yet, but I do recall the first semester is exclusively going over the seven layers of the OSI model in sometimes painful detail. Can tend to throw the beginning student off, especially considering the OSI model is not much more than an academic tool anyway, TCP/IP is were its at in the 'real world'.
Yeah, read the WP article earlier off of Google news. What really got me about it though was this fellow's supposed to be a tech writer. I have no problem with someone making a reasoned critique of Linux distros and such. However, I got the impression this article was rather thrown together, I mean really, using LiveCD SUSE as a test example? Come on, a tech writer who gets thrown in a whack because one of the DEs, KDE, uses single click instead of double? And who complains about having (he doesn't seem to be aware of niceties like synaptic mind you) to actually use commands to install something? Like others have mentioned, what the heck was this guy using in the 80s anyway? (LOAD "*", 8, 1 and we liked it!)
Have to second the Debian idea. I'm not a Debian troll by the way (maybe a zealot though ;-) I've used plenty of different distros in my Linux career. What's really got me back with Debian though now, is the beta installer they've been working on for Sarge, the thing is just sweet, takes most of the pain out of Debian. Add to that that Sarge has really become quite up to date, with the Debian sensitity to stability mixed in. (Woody really is way too old, and though sid seems to work for many, sarge doesn't lag far behind though with that extra good feeling of "it's tested I can feel safe").
Point in case, right now I'm writing this from a Debian sarge box, with 2.6 installed, Nvidia drivers working fine, no XP dual boot issues (I am running XP, on the same drive, using Grub, no problems and haven't heard of any other Debian users experiencing these woes. 2.6 runs great on this, which is a relief as I'd begun to think that perhaps Linux was starting to suck), partitioned with XFS, with good stable software which is not archaic date wise, gnome 2.4, xfree 4.3, kde 3.2, xfce4. etc...
As a final point, though this is totally subjective, for some odd reason using Debian makes me feel better about it all, on the social conscience level that is. Can't totally put my finger on it, but Debian GNU/Linux (nice how they use the term, though no I'm not a FSF fanatic) seems to be about the truest out there to the sometimes utopian ideals of community-centered, totally non-corporate, free as in free, and free, software, and all that, that makes Linux rather special.
Just my thoughts...
I remember reading this review of RH 9, and I wish we could see more reviews of this caliber. Ones that actually go into architectural and technical differences, not just if the colour scheme of the installer was good or not. http://www.gurulabs.com/RedHatLinux9-review.html
Umm, no, you need to study a bit more. Shariah as a set of laws is quite comprehensive and matters of ownership and property, trade laws, etc., certainly do fall in its parameters. What you see in places like Afghanistan under the Taleban are semi literate tribespeople who only know custom and a rather cusory understanding on some aspects on the penal codes, who then like to proclaim its Islamic law. As examples to prove my point that the Islamic Shariah is very a fully workable and comprehensive canon to govern us, just look at the volumnous works of our scholars, on aspects ranging from logic, jurisprudential principles, canonical sources, etc. Except in the rare cases of genius, the average period of time it takes to complete the full gamut of howza studies is around 20 years, after which if you've completed it, and proven yourself, you are considered capable of ijtehad. Mind you, that's why our most senior scholars tend to be rather senior, 50 years old is still considered junior for how long it really takes.
Mind you, I should mention I'm referring to the Shia tradition, of which I am a part of. The system as you would see in predominantly Sunni Egypt will differ, though I cannot claim expertise on that.
As to the hand cutting thing. That's pretty shallow. What it really is, regardless of what the ignorant who claim to invoke Shariah may think, is that under a number of rather strict circumstances, ie amount stolen, that it not be out of poverty, and other matters detailed in law books, if all that is proven, then the punishment is the amputation of the four fingers (excluding the thumb). Sure that may sound harsh to many ears, but the point is not to go around cutting people up, but to prevent the crime from happening, using enough measure (coupled with appropriate balancing of justice and mercy).
Point taken, poor choice of words. Mea culpa ;-)
Good point about the Egyptian dictatorship. Mubarak and his cronies (as well as Sadat and Nasser) are certainly not representative of Islamic principles. But as can be seen in things like the arrests/assasinations of groups like the Ikhwan are indeed its opponents.
Oh and in the odd (and admittedly remote) chance that the Egyptian fascist intellegencia read this and get the idea that linux could be subversive to them, I don't live in Egypt. This is a Canadian telling you to fuck off and die.
Interesting comment, as someone whose actually studied the shariah (though of course not gone nearly as deep as one may) and for whom Islamic studies was my mainstay before entering the IT world (I still consider it the most important thing out there, and paramount to my life, though I have to confess to dedicating an obscene amount of time to my current passion, after all it is my living). I myself have wondered about how close GPL-like thought can come into with traditional Islamic iqtisadi (roughly economic) thought. As you may konw many of the scholars (with some prominent exceptions) have rejected the concept of intellectual property, coupled with the fact that hoarding is considered a heinous sin. The idea of distributing source for the public benifit certainly seems in tune with the general Islamic ethos, though I don't know if I'd say that cancels out all closed models of software development as well (Allahu 'alam). I have given thought to the notion that Linux and other free systems is just what the Muslim nations could use right now to help bring back some of the intellectual heritage and scientific innovation that had been a hallmark in former times (not that it's dead by any means, just looks at Safawid and post Safawid metaphysics in Iran to disprove the idea that Islamic philosophy died with Ibn Rushd.) Certainly a system that Muslims can actively contribute to and make their own would be much better than just sending in checks to a closed business located in Redmond. wa salaam 'ala 'l-muhtadeen...
Correct I probably would not have thought twice. But then, if it showed Tux waiving the flag of the Third Reich, or Sig Heiling the Fuhrer, you and others would likely not think it so innocent. It's the politics of what that Israeli flag mean that miff be like me so much. (disposition of thousands if not millions, illegal assasinations, house demolitions and razings on property, racist apartheid-like segregations, etc.)
Woops! So much for posting AC dag nab it. Oh well, now you all know, I'm a raving 100% thouroughly zealous anti-Zionist. There, I said it. Now onto other things...
Posting AC because I know this will be shot down as a troll, however, something I've wondered about is what is the deal with all the Jews/Israelis involved in Gentoo development? Was this a conscious decision on the part on Daniel to have as many Jews involved or what? The first thing that threw me off from Gentoo was that KDE guy, Dan Arnak, having the Israeli flag on the Gentoo site. Then, reading some posts he made about Palestinians and such (basically he's a raving Zionist) really turned me away from this distro. I can't support a distro whose founding heads spew off such garbage. (Not meaning that I have to agree with everything they say, but there is a limit I can't in good conscience cross and the Zionist thing is one of them particularly if their advertising this nonsense on their homesite. Not to mention I have plenty of non-political technical reasons to dislike this one, but it was the politics that really turned me off).
Have to agree with what a number of people are saying here. As much as I like computers, and libraries, I'm not sure I really favour so much the current combination of them that we're seeing. Often, I've noticed they are not being used for research, and the people using them are not actually getting books out. Rather, you have 12 year olds going on yahoo chat, trying to sneak some porn, look up the latest on Britney, or other such activities. Libraries are for books, and consequently to increase literacy amongst the public. This does not seem to further that goal. Not to mention that things like this, and videos for instance, do eat away at libraries funds, both for connection and computer costs, and also because libraries sometimes need an extra staff person to monitor what's going on there. (Though in all fairness, I have used the internet in libraries before, it was helpful for me when I didn't have it at home and I can only think that there are others out there who are also using the system in a good way, and yes, I have quite often borrowed movies from the libraries (great when you have kids)).
Oh and the point someone mentioned about comp books in libraries being hopelessly out of date. Yes it can be pretty bad, plus, do they really need yet another book on their shelf on how to use Office?
I wonder if the annoyance factor about only hearing half the conversation is that people perhaps like to eavesdrop on others conversations. Hearing only half of it becomes annoying as you can't fully make out what's being said...just a thought. But yeah, I hate the things too, don't own one, don't know if I will. Hard to think I'm technophobic, when technology is my line of work, but sometimes seeing somebody walk down a hall seemingly talking to themself kind of strike me as odd. What really surprised me when I started working where I do, is the amount of people of who carry on conversations on them...in the freaking bathroom, sometimes while the work is in progress, if you follow. Man, that's just bad (sort of like not washing your hands after you're done. sorry, that's just disgusting; please do not shake my hand, nor touch my food.)
Indeed it was. Actually I had a pretty good run there, and like I said, nothing to complain about now. But that first course was a bit of a joke content wise. And like I said, I was rather sceptical of the place of Cisco in the school curicula. Now though, I have been seriously thinking of taking up a proper CS course load at a four year. (Yay I can learn useful things like LISP! /sarcasm)
Totally agree. Actually it's worse though. Few years back took my first college level computer course (Intro to computers). Was looking forward to what might be a nice little overview of the technologies, history, maybe a dash of programming thrown in, etc. Nope. I was (mainly) a course on how to use Microsoft Office 2000. Word, Access, Excel, Powerpoint. THAT's what people are being taught is computing now. Hence, the lady at my college who knew MS office pretty good was reffered to as a computer wiz. Sad, back when I went to high school and took the computer class back then, it was for programming BASIC on Commodore 64s. Anyhow, after that, the rest of the computer networking track I was on consisted either of taking the Cisco courses, or the MS Win2k admining ones. I went with MS. (one could complain about how so many schools are being duped into passing off these Cisco academy courses as well, creating a legion of rather useless, and unemployed CCNAs, I wonder how much Cisco is paying them... It's a good thing to know, the Cisco stuff, but when that's ALL you know, I wonder) Anyhow, long story short, the MS teacher I had was pretty good, and knew my interest in Linux. He gave me a good amount of room to explore that avenue, and the day after graduation started working in tech support for a major tech company doing linux server support.
So mines a happy story in the end, but as regards the situation you're mentioning with the homeschooling and all, I agree. Two little boys of my own, one about to be in grade 1. We're going to try the home route as well, especially after seeing how terrible the K level could be (I don't appreciate my son being brainwashed with historical lies and propaganda, turning kids not into better human beings, but better members of the machine. Especially at such a young age when he's not in a position to really critically analyze things. Yeah, that was really something to have my son come home after the sep11 observance class saying he and his friends want to become soldiers "because they help people", all the while a war of lies is building to attack another nation. We're Muslims by the way (convert myself).) Anyhow, best wishes for you and yours, hopefully things will work out better.
Interesting comment. This weekend I just went ahead and installed XP pro in my Windows partition, and though the guys at work (we're pretty thoroughgoing Linux people) would really be on my case for saying this, I have to admit I'm impressed. Not from a security standpoint, and all those neat features really don't have much of a place in the workplace, but as a nice OS to use at home, play games with, watch DVDs, etc., it really does the job nicely. Even on the development end, if for instance you're into Java, like I'm becoming, the platform becomes pretty irrelevant (theoretically). I'd still rather be using Linux at work, as I do, but for home, looks like this XP-thing will do nicely (just turn off all the stupid fisher-price skins stuff, and lock it down (to the extent possible) by turning off services and such (man, they have terminal services turned ON by default... shesh). I did have 2k installed previously here, but for what I'm using it for, looks like XP is a surprising improvement (even if only incrementally). Not that I'll be erasing my Linux home installs anytime soon (RH and Slack). Just my 2 cents.