A number of years ago, Walt Disney Corp sued the owners of West Edmonton Mall over trademark infringement. This is because Disneyland has a "Fantasy Land" section to their Anaheim location, and West Edmonton Mall had an indoor amusement park named "FantasyLand." The lawsuit was for $1. Disney won. The indoor amusement park is now called "GalaxyLand".
Meanwhile, West Edmonton Mall still has an attached hotel which is still called "FantasyLand Hotel".
That said, many people have heard of both DisnleyLand and W.E.M. - I've never even heard of IIR before this article.
I think they were going to call it "F-mail" but decided that some pr0n company would probably sue them for intellectual property violation. And they didn't want that. At least, not in public.
And there are cops out there who aren't crooked. And there are Catholic priests who don't molest boys. And there are politicians who actually genuinely believe they are doing the best they can for the people they serve. And there are lawyers who aren't out to gouge their clients to further their careers.
I would even wager that these are all the majority of the members of each of these groups - most journalists actually care more about reporting the truth than slanting it, more cops are more worried about truth and justice than about finding underhanded ways to line their pockets, or even finding the next donut shop to fill their ever-growing bellies, more priests who care about the souls entrusted to their care and live up to their vows of celibacy, etc.
It's just that we don't hear about the normal cases. And that colours our perceptions of each group. They just aren't newsworthy. Which is kind of ironic in this thread - the journalists only report on bad journalists, so that's all we hear about, that's all that is brought to our attention, so that's all we know about.
It's sorta like hearing about your best friend's significant other: if all they tell you about their SO is what an arse he is or nag she is or whatever, that's all you know. They probably don't tell you about the times where they make up and become happy with each other again, and then it surprises the heck out of you when they get engaged... you just don't hear about it.
Offer those with the beachfront homes a choice. Wind farms in front of their view or nuclear power plants behind them. I wonder which one they'd choose.
Sounds like the US has the same problem as Canada. Most people in Toronto think that Toronto == Canada. Although I'm guessing California isn't the only place where the residents think their own locale is equivalent to the nation.
Actually, here in Canada, I heard an advert for Windows on the radio just yesterday which got me thinking how scared MS must be about their core business to start advertising Windows when their next big release is still on the edge of the radar screen. They were advertising all the things you can do with a computer, and pointing out that Windows has the driver support to make all this happen (I guess they're pointing out how many things you can't do with Linux without actually using the word "Linux").
Note, too, that the radio station in question can only hit about 1 to 1.5 million people if they were all tuned it at the same time to the same station. So we're not even talking about a large market or anything for this advertisement. I'm not talking about Toronto here - much, much smaller. At least an order of magnitude smaller.
No idea sorry, I'm agnostic myself. God would have to exist before I could hate him anyhow. A child can even prove that they exist, so why can't god manage to do such a small thing?
God's existance, or lack thereof, is either undetermined or indeterminable, or that's how I understand the agnostic perspective. Stating "God doesn't exist" (or implying it as you do above) would be an atheist perspective - that either God's lack of existance is determined, or that the preponderance of evidence leads them to believe that God doesn't exist. So I'm not sure that "I'm agnostic" and "God would have to exist before I could hate him" quite go together. Now, if you mean "I would have to believe God exists before I could hate him," then that makes much more sense.
And just because god didn't prove that he exists to you doesn't mean he didn't prove that he exists to himself;-)
Certainly, but faith and belief are merely that. They have no grounds in reality whatsoever and can never be facts.
I disagree. My faith and belief are strongly grounded in reality. That they are not formal proofs acceptable to the whole world, I'm ok with. I'm not asking you to accept them as scientific truths, merely as one rational way of viewing the world. We all have our coloured glasses when we look at the world, whether that colour is one of faith in a god, faith in the lack of gods, or abject disinterest to the entire subject of gods. While the latter is certainly quite pragmatic, only one of the first two will be right;-). We just can't prove either to everyone's satisfaction, which is where the agnostics are entirely correct.
It's safer to infer that God is fiction just like any other fiction one is likely to cook up in ones head.
Just out of curiosity... safer in what definition? Safer for your eternal soul, if we even have them? Or safer in a contemporary intellectual perspective? If even the answer is more along the lines of "safer from the perspective of a more self-consistant answer", then I'd like to point out those coloured glasses again. Many rational human beings believe that the existance of god(s) is more self-consistant. It's just the perspective of their viewpoint.
Actually, it was the occult (magic) and science that used to be one - Alchemy, astrology etc. Christianity hated and persecuted that too. Deep down I guess you Christians knew that it was only a mater of time before people realised that there is no disernible god or gods.
I always thought that the Catholic Church's funding of various sciences (as long as they didn't contradict Holy Teaching;->) was indicative of the ties between science and theology. But that's not a history I'm so strong in.
"They" is a very difficult term to deal with. "They" are likely hundreds, if not a thousand or more, developers, working on more subsystems than most people may want to admit. Maybe even more than MS would want to admit.
Getting a small team of 15-20 developers together who know enough about all of these areas is basically impossible. Even getting together a team of 15-20 developers together who can then go to all the subsystems to find out what is required - honestly, that's not even close to trivial. Between bureaucratese ("Why am I going to waste my time helping you - I have my own deadlines to meet!") and plain lack of knowledge and care ("Hmmm... never thought about that before, I'll get back to you on that, ok?"), it would be quite difficult to get all the required information from every team.
I completely understand how difficult this is. My current position is an install team member for a product suite that has over 500 developers, albeit spread out over significant chunks of North America (and Germany and, yes, India). Now get this: figuring out what is required to get your subsystem installed and configured on an end-user's machine should be relatively trivial, right? Well, when you have one, two, or maybe even five subsystems, that should be true. But not for 500 developers in dozens of subsystems. Heck, 10 developers on the same subsystem, and we're lucky if they can piece it together between the lot of them.
And figuring out what needs to be installed and configured has to be easier than figuring out what patches, etc., are required. And... complexity grows exponentially, and I presume Windows has more than 500 developers working on it (including IE, OE, and anything else that is bundled with the OS). Really one of the advantages of F/OSS - even though Konqueror, for example, may be bundled with SuSE, it is quite separate from the core operating system, unlike IE vs Windows. However, Konqueror *is* bundled with the rest of KDE - fixes in one part of KDE may need to be synchronised with fixes in Konqueror, and that's where the complexity starts to arise with patches.
First off, why hide behind anonymity? Afraid someone would mod you down? If I had mod points, and you weren't AC, and I hadn't already posted to this story, I would mod that up informative.
Second, I hope you do understand that it's hard enough knowing what your next door neighbour is up to, nevermind what the surrounding states do, nevermind surrounding countries. There's only so much news that a person can internalise at a time, and, sorry to say, the middle east only gets a small chunk of it in North America (and probably many other non-middle-east places as well).
Add to that that largely we only see the governments of people, not the people themselves, and then add the fact that the media, whether you think it's biased to the left or the right, is definitely biased towards sensationalism. Hearing about a boutique that has opened in Tehran is not news. Hearing about a young woman hung from a crane - that's sensational.
Finally add the government itself - still largely theocratic, isn't it? That does not serve to expose a shift away from hardcore Islam to the rest of the world. If Iran wants to expose a different face to the world, it needs to start in two places: first, and foremost, the government - it needs to make a concerted effort to educate the world about its changes. We know about Afghanistan's changes, and Iraq's changes, largely because of the US-led war. War is sensational, it makes the news. Civil war is another good way to change government and get everyone to know it - although it ranks a distant second to a foreign-led war, I would think. Second way for Iran to educate the world about its changes is through its population - largely ex-patriats such as yourself, but also via the internet in public chat rooms (I use a loose definition of chat room here - for this purpose,/. counts). Thus I congratulate you on being part of that global re-understanding of Iran. And I thank you for it.
As a member of the so-called "moral right", let me assure you that most mailing lists and other "moral right" news sources (largely blogs) are appalled at this. The divide seems to me to be somewhere along the lines of whether a pre-emptive war is justified or not (significant portions, whether Catholic or not, point to the Roman Pontiff as their ally against war - these would be a similar group to those who thought Saddam deserved to be deposed, but weren't really in favour of the war in Iraq). And, if not, what alternatives we have in dissuading Iran from these inhuman practices. (Of course, China gets full marks for inhumanity, too.)
I'm running an xterm. Definitely an X-based app. I happen to have a privileged shell running in it. Another malicious application is running on my DISPLAY (whether that is started by me, or over the network via X protocols). Can it send messages to the xterm to cause it to think that I typed "rm -rf/" in that window? Nevermind that finding it would be difficult - finding such a window on Windows would not necessarily be easy, either, IIRC.
I know many Albertans who would welcome it;-) My constituency had one of those "Alberta separatist" party clowns running in the last provincial election. Sad thing is that they didn't get zero votes...
(I'm neither for nor against Alberta separating from Canada in principle. However, I don't trust anyone to do it properly, so I'd never vote in favour.)
Both the US and Canada are oil producers, too. The difference? The US is "led" by Texas (sitting president is from which state?), while Canada's leaders cannot consistantly point out "Alberta" on a Canadian map.
Just to expand a bit on this. Not much - I'm going to grossly oversimplify this. Each "baud" is merely a change in signal. However, it is an analog change, not a digital change. These signals do not need to be either "0" or "1". They can be "2", "3", "4", etc. (there is a limit here, too, I'm sure). 33.6k is merely 3.5 times 9.6k, so we have amplitudes of 0 through 3 (4 discrete values, one of every two signals has an extra parity bit). Using 6 amplitudes (0-5), we get 57.6k, or, minus the parity, 56k. But we're still transmitting at 9600 baud.
Of course, that only matters to geeks. To the rest of the world, baud is irrelevant. It's how fast the pr0n downloads that counts.
I'm not saying you're wrong - while I'm sure things are always much more complex than a couple lines can say, you've probably boiled down a significant portion of it. I'm just going to say it's unfortunate. What they're not realising is that just because they aren't pursuing fundamental research doesn't mean someone else isn't. And that will unbalance the status quo - and not in their own favour, usually.
That's pretty much what I said - you have the option to go either way. I've posted a few URLs in this thread which contradict Wikipedia's view, and I'm not saying that they're necessarily better - I just choose to believe them (because, in my view, they seem more realistic when taking into account the time period in question) instead. You get to make your own choice, too, and, wonderful thing about living in a (relatively) free society is that it doesn't have to be the same as mine.;-)
Actually, the first Crusade (only) was retaliation. And that I don't get from the Catholic Church. That I get from Islam. The rest of the Crusades were to convert infidels to Christianity (and they pretty much all failed, IIRC). They were all to capture the Holy Land - but the first one was to do so in retaliation. The Christians were more than willing to let Muslims rule the Holy Land, as long as the Christian churches were left unharrassed (which Muslims did - only the one leader did not want to leave the Christians out of his power struggle, and, IIRC, he did it against the advice of his court of advisors...).
That's fine - we've had many comments on/. talking about inaccuracies of Wikipedia. Without really any way to verify the authors of those entries as being experts in the field (vs simply parroting popular misconceptions), you can take 'em or leave 'em. Either way is a statement of faith, not fact.
I hate responding to AC's... google search on Torquemada, first result: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14783a.htm. Torquemada is claimed to be quite reasonable, compared to civil law at the time. In other words, enlightened. Cruelty, death - still possible. But more rare than before Torquemada.
Where do I get this? From theologians. Sure, maybe there's some bias there - but at least they've studied actual real histories. The Vatican has recently opened up their vaults from these time periods to allow a full study of the Inquisitions... and the conclusion is that the Inquisitions were very enlightened for the time. By today's standards, they were cruel. But they were a huge jump in the right direction.
For example, James Hitchcock, a professor of history at St. Louis University.
I'm not claiming retaliation was a defense - if you'd read my post, I said it was a reasonable example of religion killing. There are mitigating circumstances (it wasn't an unprovoked war), but it's still religion killing.
And, if you can't have a calm discussion about history... well, unfortunately, you seem to be in the majority here. <sigh>
Ignoring, for the moment, that the Inquisition was set up to prevent torture and killing (see my earlier post)... those who were tortured and/or killed despite the inquisition were so punished because of possible threats to the king's power (anyone undermining the Church's power implicitly undermined the king's power since the king's power was nominally based on the Church's power as an appointed leader).
I hate to do this... especially since the Crusades (which was a defensive war, contrary to popular belief - the Arabian leader sacked the holiest of Christian churches, which was basically without defense, making Europe mad - the first Crusade was retaliatory) were a reasonable example from the threads above. However, I have to.
The Inquisitions, also contrary to popular belief, did not kill people. It was the authority of Kings who didn't know theology who killed people. Inquisitions actually were set up to save people from death. Many people were being accused of heresy (a crime punishable by death according to the king's law at the time - anything that ran contrary to faith also undermined the King's God-appointed power, so it was treated like treason). However, the civilian lawyers and judges were not versed in theology enough to actually rule fairly on the subject. The Catholic Church set up Inquisitions in various European nations where the judge and lawyers were all theologians (usually priests). This cut the death rate to a mere fraction of what it was before the Inquisitions. The Inquisitions, especially the Spanish Inquisition, were the height of fair trials for the time period - in fact, much of our current court system is derived from the expertise of the Inquisitions.
That's not to say that the name of religions haven't been used as an excuse to kill people, just like the name of other ideologies (especially Naziism and Communism) have been used to kill people.
Arguably, however, some ideologies/theologies are more prone to violence than others. However, that's another debate for another day in another section of/.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
A number of years ago, Walt Disney Corp sued the owners of West Edmonton Mall over trademark infringement. This is because Disneyland has a "Fantasy Land" section to their Anaheim location, and West Edmonton Mall had an indoor amusement park named "FantasyLand." The lawsuit was for $1. Disney won. The indoor amusement park is now called "GalaxyLand".
Meanwhile, West Edmonton Mall still has an attached hotel which is still called "FantasyLand Hotel".
That said, many people have heard of both DisnleyLand and W.E.M. - I've never even heard of IIR before this article.
I think they were going to call it "F-mail" but decided that some pr0n company would probably sue them for intellectual property violation. And they didn't want that. At least, not in public.
And there are cops out there who aren't crooked. And there are Catholic priests who don't molest boys. And there are politicians who actually genuinely believe they are doing the best they can for the people they serve. And there are lawyers who aren't out to gouge their clients to further their careers.
I would even wager that these are all the majority of the members of each of these groups - most journalists actually care more about reporting the truth than slanting it, more cops are more worried about truth and justice than about finding underhanded ways to line their pockets, or even finding the next donut shop to fill their ever-growing bellies, more priests who care about the souls entrusted to their care and live up to their vows of celibacy, etc.
It's just that we don't hear about the normal cases. And that colours our perceptions of each group. They just aren't newsworthy. Which is kind of ironic in this thread - the journalists only report on bad journalists, so that's all we hear about, that's all that is brought to our attention, so that's all we know about.
It's sorta like hearing about your best friend's significant other: if all they tell you about their SO is what an arse he is or nag she is or whatever, that's all you know. They probably don't tell you about the times where they make up and become happy with each other again, and then it surprises the heck out of you when they get engaged... you just don't hear about it.
It's not perjury until you say it under oath. Until then, it's merely obstruction of justice. Very different crimes.
Offer those with the beachfront homes a choice. Wind farms in front of their view or nuclear power plants behind them. I wonder which one they'd choose.
Sounds like the US has the same problem as Canada. Most people in Toronto think that Toronto == Canada. Although I'm guessing California isn't the only place where the residents think their own locale is equivalent to the nation.
Actually, here in Canada, I heard an advert for Windows on the radio just yesterday which got me thinking how scared MS must be about their core business to start advertising Windows when their next big release is still on the edge of the radar screen. They were advertising all the things you can do with a computer, and pointing out that Windows has the driver support to make all this happen (I guess they're pointing out how many things you can't do with Linux without actually using the word "Linux").
Note, too, that the radio station in question can only hit about 1 to 1.5 million people if they were all tuned it at the same time to the same station. So we're not even talking about a large market or anything for this advertisement. I'm not talking about Toronto here - much, much smaller. At least an order of magnitude smaller.
IBM
... Anyone want to bet smaller companies do, too? Say ... SCO?
No idea sorry, I'm agnostic myself. God would have to exist before I could hate him anyhow. A child can even prove that they exist, so why can't god manage to do such a small thing?
God's existance, or lack thereof, is either undetermined or indeterminable, or that's how I understand the agnostic perspective. Stating "God doesn't exist" (or implying it as you do above) would be an atheist perspective - that either God's lack of existance is determined, or that the preponderance of evidence leads them to believe that God doesn't exist. So I'm not sure that "I'm agnostic" and "God would have to exist before I could hate him" quite go together. Now, if you mean "I would have to believe God exists before I could hate him," then that makes much more sense.
And just because god didn't prove that he exists to you doesn't mean he didn't prove that he exists to himself ;-)
Certainly, but faith and belief are merely that. They have no grounds in reality whatsoever and can never be facts.
I disagree. My faith and belief are strongly grounded in reality. That they are not formal proofs acceptable to the whole world, I'm ok with. I'm not asking you to accept them as scientific truths, merely as one rational way of viewing the world. We all have our coloured glasses when we look at the world, whether that colour is one of faith in a god, faith in the lack of gods, or abject disinterest to the entire subject of gods. While the latter is certainly quite pragmatic, only one of the first two will be right ;-). We just can't prove either to everyone's satisfaction, which is where the agnostics are entirely correct.
It's safer to infer that God is fiction just like any other fiction one is likely to cook up in ones head.
Just out of curiosity ... safer in what definition? Safer for your eternal soul, if we even have them? Or safer in a contemporary intellectual perspective? If even the answer is more along the lines of "safer from the perspective of a more self-consistant answer", then I'd like to point out those coloured glasses again. Many rational human beings believe that the existance of god(s) is more self-consistant. It's just the perspective of their viewpoint.
Actually, it was the occult (magic) and science that used to be one - Alchemy, astrology etc. Christianity hated and persecuted that too. Deep down I guess you Christians knew that it was only a mater of time before people realised that there is no disernible god or gods.
I always thought that the Catholic Church's funding of various sciences (as long as they didn't contradict Holy Teaching ;->) was indicative of the ties between science and theology. But that's not a history I'm so strong in.
"They" is a very difficult term to deal with. "They" are likely hundreds, if not a thousand or more, developers, working on more subsystems than most people may want to admit. Maybe even more than MS would want to admit.
Getting a small team of 15-20 developers together who know enough about all of these areas is basically impossible. Even getting together a team of 15-20 developers together who can then go to all the subsystems to find out what is required - honestly, that's not even close to trivial. Between bureaucratese ("Why am I going to waste my time helping you - I have my own deadlines to meet!") and plain lack of knowledge and care ("Hmmm ... never thought about that before, I'll get back to you on that, ok?"), it would be quite difficult to get all the required information from every team.
I completely understand how difficult this is. My current position is an install team member for a product suite that has over 500 developers, albeit spread out over significant chunks of North America (and Germany and, yes, India). Now get this: figuring out what is required to get your subsystem installed and configured on an end-user's machine should be relatively trivial, right? Well, when you have one, two, or maybe even five subsystems, that should be true. But not for 500 developers in dozens of subsystems. Heck, 10 developers on the same subsystem, and we're lucky if they can piece it together between the lot of them.
And figuring out what needs to be installed and configured has to be easier than figuring out what patches, etc., are required. And ... complexity grows exponentially, and I presume Windows has more than 500 developers working on it (including IE, OE, and anything else that is bundled with the OS). Really one of the advantages of F/OSS - even though Konqueror, for example, may be bundled with SuSE, it is quite separate from the core operating system, unlike IE vs Windows. However, Konqueror *is* bundled with the rest of KDE - fixes in one part of KDE may need to be synchronised with fixes in Konqueror, and that's where the complexity starts to arise with patches.
First off, why hide behind anonymity? Afraid someone would mod you down? If I had mod points, and you weren't AC, and I hadn't already posted to this story, I would mod that up informative.
Second, I hope you do understand that it's hard enough knowing what your next door neighbour is up to, nevermind what the surrounding states do, nevermind surrounding countries. There's only so much news that a person can internalise at a time, and, sorry to say, the middle east only gets a small chunk of it in North America (and probably many other non-middle-east places as well).
Add to that that largely we only see the governments of people, not the people themselves, and then add the fact that the media, whether you think it's biased to the left or the right, is definitely biased towards sensationalism. Hearing about a boutique that has opened in Tehran is not news. Hearing about a young woman hung from a crane - that's sensational.
Finally add the government itself - still largely theocratic, isn't it? That does not serve to expose a shift away from hardcore Islam to the rest of the world. If Iran wants to expose a different face to the world, it needs to start in two places: first, and foremost, the government - it needs to make a concerted effort to educate the world about its changes. We know about Afghanistan's changes, and Iraq's changes, largely because of the US-led war. War is sensational, it makes the news. Civil war is another good way to change government and get everyone to know it - although it ranks a distant second to a foreign-led war, I would think. Second way for Iran to educate the world about its changes is through its population - largely ex-patriats such as yourself, but also via the internet in public chat rooms (I use a loose definition of chat room here - for this purpose, /. counts). Thus I congratulate you on being part of that global re-understanding of Iran. And I thank you for it.
As a member of the so-called "moral right", let me assure you that most mailing lists and other "moral right" news sources (largely blogs) are appalled at this. The divide seems to me to be somewhere along the lines of whether a pre-emptive war is justified or not (significant portions, whether Catholic or not, point to the Roman Pontiff as their ally against war - these would be a similar group to those who thought Saddam deserved to be deposed, but weren't really in favour of the war in Iraq). And, if not, what alternatives we have in dissuading Iran from these inhuman practices. (Of course, China gets full marks for inhumanity, too.)
Ok, maybe I left the description a bit too vague.
I'm running an xterm. Definitely an X-based app. I happen to have a privileged shell running in it. Another malicious application is running on my DISPLAY (whether that is started by me, or over the network via X protocols). Can it send messages to the xterm to cause it to think that I typed "rm -rf /" in that window? Nevermind that finding it would be difficult - finding such a window on Windows would not necessarily be easy, either, IIRC.
I'm also kinda curious ... if I have a root terminal open on my desktop, can a malicious program running as me do something similar?
If not, then it's a security deficiency in the Windows API for allowing it. If this can be done on X too, then it's a security deficiency in both.
You don't get security points by leaving a door unlocked and a note on it saying, "Please use other door."
I know many Albertans who would welcome it ;-) My constituency had one of those "Alberta separatist" party clowns running in the last provincial election. Sad thing is that they didn't get zero votes...
(I'm neither for nor against Alberta separating from Canada in principle. However, I don't trust anyone to do it properly, so I'd never vote in favour.)
Both the US and Canada are oil producers, too. The difference? The US is "led" by Texas (sitting president is from which state?), while Canada's leaders cannot consistantly point out "Alberta" on a Canadian map.
Just to expand a bit on this. Not much - I'm going to grossly oversimplify this. Each "baud" is merely a change in signal. However, it is an analog change, not a digital change. These signals do not need to be either "0" or "1". They can be "2", "3", "4", etc. (there is a limit here, too, I'm sure). 33.6k is merely 3.5 times 9.6k, so we have amplitudes of 0 through 3 (4 discrete values, one of every two signals has an extra parity bit). Using 6 amplitudes (0-5), we get 57.6k, or, minus the parity, 56k. But we're still transmitting at 9600 baud.
Of course, that only matters to geeks. To the rest of the world, baud is irrelevant. It's how fast the pr0n downloads that counts.
I'm not saying you're wrong - while I'm sure things are always much more complex than a couple lines can say, you've probably boiled down a significant portion of it. I'm just going to say it's unfortunate. What they're not realising is that just because they aren't pursuing fundamental research doesn't mean someone else isn't. And that will unbalance the status quo - and not in their own favour, usually.
That's pretty much what I said - you have the option to go either way. I've posted a few URLs in this thread which contradict Wikipedia's view, and I'm not saying that they're necessarily better - I just choose to believe them (because, in my view, they seem more realistic when taking into account the time period in question) instead. You get to make your own choice, too, and, wonderful thing about living in a (relatively) free society is that it doesn't have to be the same as mine. ;-)
Actually, the first Crusade (only) was retaliation. And that I don't get from the Catholic Church. That I get from Islam. The rest of the Crusades were to convert infidels to Christianity (and they pretty much all failed, IIRC). They were all to capture the Holy Land - but the first one was to do so in retaliation. The Christians were more than willing to let Muslims rule the Holy Land, as long as the Christian churches were left unharrassed (which Muslims did - only the one leader did not want to leave the Christians out of his power struggle, and, IIRC, he did it against the advice of his court of advisors...).
That's fine - we've had many comments on /. talking about inaccuracies of Wikipedia. Without really any way to verify the authors of those entries as being experts in the field (vs simply parroting popular misconceptions), you can take 'em or leave 'em. Either way is a statement of faith, not fact.
I hate responding to AC's ... google search on Torquemada, first result: http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14783a.htm. Torquemada is claimed to be quite reasonable, compared to civil law at the time. In other words, enlightened. Cruelty, death - still possible. But more rare than before Torquemada.
Where do I get this? From theologians. Sure, maybe there's some bias there - but at least they've studied actual real histories. The Vatican has recently opened up their vaults from these time periods to allow a full study of the Inquisitions... and the conclusion is that the Inquisitions were very enlightened for the time. By today's standards, they were cruel. But they were a huge jump in the right direction.
For example, James Hitchcock, a professor of history at St. Louis University.
I'm not claiming retaliation was a defense - if you'd read my post, I said it was a reasonable example of religion killing. There are mitigating circumstances (it wasn't an unprovoked war), but it's still religion killing.
And, if you can't have a calm discussion about history ... well, unfortunately, you seem to be in the majority here. <sigh>
Ignoring, for the moment, that the Inquisition was set up to prevent torture and killing (see my earlier post) ... those who were tortured and/or killed despite the inquisition were so punished because of possible threats to the king's power (anyone undermining the Church's power implicitly undermined the king's power since the king's power was nominally based on the Church's power as an appointed leader).
I hate to do this ... especially since the Crusades (which was a defensive war, contrary to popular belief - the Arabian leader sacked the holiest of Christian churches, which was basically without defense, making Europe mad - the first Crusade was retaliatory) were a reasonable example from the threads above. However, I have to.
The Inquisitions, also contrary to popular belief, did not kill people. It was the authority of Kings who didn't know theology who killed people. Inquisitions actually were set up to save people from death. Many people were being accused of heresy (a crime punishable by death according to the king's law at the time - anything that ran contrary to faith also undermined the King's God-appointed power, so it was treated like treason). However, the civilian lawyers and judges were not versed in theology enough to actually rule fairly on the subject. The Catholic Church set up Inquisitions in various European nations where the judge and lawyers were all theologians (usually priests). This cut the death rate to a mere fraction of what it was before the Inquisitions. The Inquisitions, especially the Spanish Inquisition, were the height of fair trials for the time period - in fact, much of our current court system is derived from the expertise of the Inquisitions.
That's not to say that the name of religions haven't been used as an excuse to kill people, just like the name of other ideologies (especially Naziism and Communism) have been used to kill people.
Arguably, however, some ideologies/theologies are more prone to violence than others. However, that's another debate for another day in another section of /. :-)