My friend, you have hit the nail on the head. Well done.
I don't know if you're on the left or right; but, it doesn't matter. Your feelings resonate with mine, perfectly. In the spirit of your post, I won't tell which end of the political spectrum I fall. Although, the very idea that it is quite possible that we're on opposite ends of the spectrum, does amuse me, and strengthen my faith in the tech. community.
How the UI's look? How they friggin' look? My interface is sexy, brilliant, and easy to understand:
root@localhost #
You type your commands here, and if you don't know, the manual is built into the system... man, apropos, info, etc... It suits me fine, thankyouverymuch.
I've found that virtualization is a nice buffer zone from management decisions! Case in point, yesterday my boss (he's got a degree in comp. sci - 20 years ago...), who's just getting somewhat used to the linux server that I set up, decided that we should 'put/var in the/data directory tree'; I had folded once when he wanted to put/home in/data, for backup reasons, and made it a symlink from/.
Now when he gets these ideas, before just going and doing it on the production server, I can say "How about I make a VM and we'll see how that goes over", thinking under my breath the words of Keith Moon, "That'll go over like a lead zeppelin". It give me a technology to leverage where I can show that an idea is a Bad Idea, without having to trash the production server to prove my point.
I've even set up a virtual network (1 samba PDC and 3 windows machines), to simulate our network on a small scale to set up proof of concepts. If they don't believe that something will work, I can show them without having their blessing to mess with our network. If it doesn't work, I roll back to my snapshots, and I have a virgin virtual network again.
Does anyone do this? Has it worked out where you can do a proof of concept that otherwise, without virtualization, you would be confined to whiteboard concepts that no one would listen to?
Nah, it happened to me the other day. Got modded a troll by someone for saying something that rubbed them the wrong way...it happens.
We love that cliche here... in fact, we use it twice on every discussion. What really happened is someone read what you said and used their own mental 'tone', and thought that you were trolling. A single -1 or even 3 won't touch your karma; meta-moderate for the next 3 days and you'll probably be ahead of the game.
Chances are that it'll be disputed when it comes up for meta-moderation, and said modder will no longer be...erm, modding. Well, not as much, at least. Walk it off...we're all human here and sometimes we misjudge a comment, at the end of the day your karma will be fine.
Yeah, in my original I wrote that I thought that it had to be non-polar, but I wasn't so sure about it, so I took it out. I'm fairly sure you're right. I think it takes a LOT of electricity to break a double covalent bond, and still quite a bit to break a covalent bond. So, those electrons are fairly well 'glued' in their orbits... But when you take into consideration that the water will be absorbing heat in the presence of something like 2.5 amps (I'm assuming 300 watts @ 120 VDC - I'm sure this is oversimplified and wrong), I'm sure some change takes place. It's been a good 3 years since highschool (or any) chem., and I didn't take AP. Anyone got an authorative answer to this?
Yeah, 5 minutes is all it took. I think over time they had the same problem with the oil as the did the distilled water - the intimate proximation of the liquid to the wires quickly (relatively) ionizes it. I think the resistance is the key factor. Thus, water was stable for 5 minutes and oil, IIRC was like 3 months or so. Either way, all liquids in contact with circuits will, over time, become conductive. As always, if I'm wrong, please correct me.
Clean (Distilled), water is an insulator. In fact, toms hardware inmersed a computer in water in their article
Strip Out The Fans, Add 8 Gallons of Cooking Oil. Just used distilled water, and not tap water - as you shouldn't be using tap water, anyways since it eats away at the parts of a water cooling system.
As long as you don't have free electrons, you won't be passing current.
It would be worth my tax dollars to see Microsoft try to explain that our government went down due to a stale file lock. That, or that due to dependency tracking, the code for the power button (or bill, in this case) will be in the stable branch in 3 more months. I'm thinking of the scene with Bill Gates in the South Park movie...
"You said that windows 98 would be more reliable than windows 95!"
"It is, infact it's 10000 times more reliab..."
BLAM!
Awfully nice of a computer security company that, just being a year old, to include PowerPoint slides of their hacking tool on their website! Yeah, right, I guess I'll just download them and assume they're not infected.
And for that note, they'd better be! It would be even scarrier if said company was actually using powerpoint as an effective means of communication to all their 1337 brethren using windows.
Then again, the source is for visual studio... Something about this rubs me the wrong way, anyone else?
Completely off topic, but I just realized while thinking of holes in office... is today patch tuesday? Or is that next tuesday?
Oh, yeah, and their program doesn't work with linksys wireless G cards, nor does it understand the '/?' switch from the command line.
Can't argue with you there, but how much scrutiny would something like this warrant? Is this "ThePirateBay"?
Haha, yeah... well, TPB was back up in under 24 hours anyways, IIRC, so that whole thing backfired, anyways. Not to mention the political clout it gave their party.
I know that it doesn't warrant that much investigation...but this is the RIAA we're talking about. Truthfully, the whole thing doesn't warrant the attention that they've already given it. But, they have deep pockets and a fear mentality. It's kinda' like when we get new toys for the army and just have to blow something up to remind everyone to 'stay in line'. So, I'm never very surprised at the lengths they'll go to, in money and time, to press an issue that they know they don't have a single leg to stand on. Imagine how scary they would sound in court:
"We got the results back from our advanced physics lab which indicates that there is a 95% chance that this binary pattern is a 15 second clip of a bootleg Brittany Spears live concert recording. Furthermore, someone overwrote it 37 times trying to conseal it. Lastly, we can tell that this harddrive was placed within 8 inches of an unshielded stereo speaker, for more than 2 months, by the magnetic signature spread over the disk."
I never underestimate their perogative to intimidate at their own expense.
Anyone who has done a bit of forensics work will tell you that, short of physical destruction of the drive, you can reconstruct every last bit of a computer.
Anyone who tells you that is spouting nonsense, and no forensics expert. If he's calling himself a forensics expert, he's bullshitting.
I'm not claiming to be a forensics expert, I'm sorry if I came off that way in that sentence, that was completely unintentional. I also wasn't saying that it isn't prohibitively expensive and difficult, I was just saying that it's possible. It was merely an illustration of our technical ability as of late.
So, you are saying that there is an absolute truth; this is specifically what I am espousing, as well. You are saying that the truth is in science, I'm saying that the truth is in Jesus. My answer isn't "I don't know and nobody can explain it", rather my answer is "I don't know the answer, but I do know Jesus."
Religion subverts the process and configures the "I don't know and nobody can explain it, so God must have done it" trap that you have fallen into.
Looking at what you have said, objectively, will you not humor me for a moment and contemplate the converse of this?
Science...configures the "God couldn't have done it, so I can explain it" trap that you have fallen into.
God resists the proud of heart, but shows mercy and grace to the humble. I'm not saying that you're a proud person, but I do know that Jesus said that all who seek Him will find Him. It seems that most of us find Him when we're broken to the point that we finally acknowledge ourselves for what we are. Seek humbly, and you will find Him. God's promises are as good as gold.
That's EXACTLY my story!... Just about 3 years ago. But, I'm software development major, not engineering:)
Lately (well, as of the last year), I've become very interested in the doctrine of grace. It's entirely fascinating. And, it also gives a great layout of the Gods 'legal' requirements (He has to follow His own law, otherwise He isn't a perfect judge...Like giving dominion of earth to man, and then coming down as a man in the form of Jesus; legal loophole, if you will, since He can't just 'take it back'.) for faith. It goes a little something like this...
You aren't perfect. God is. You cannot make yourself perfect by doing works, and faith is a work. Your faith in God isn't enough, but His faith in you, is... the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. You are under Grace, not the law - which means since you (Jesus in you) are not under the law, you are able to have a relationship with God. It's not at all about religion; it's about a relationship, that can only happen since Jesus payed for your sins which makes you perfect in Gods eyes. But, as I said, there is nothing that you can do to obtain it; in the end, you can't even save yourself by your faith (work), only God can do it since His faith is perfect.
I'd recommend it as a topic of study for a follower who is of the scientific type. I always, personally, find the topics of law and grace very interesting. Unfortunately you won't find many sunday morning sermons on Gods legal requirements, as it seems to bore the congregation... Ravi Zacharias covers some of this material, I think.
Design is a scientific hypothesis that isn't supported by any evidence.
If it were, I'm sure we would have heard all about it already.
Unless, of course, you immediately dismiss it as 'pseudo-science' before objectively listening. If you aren't listening, you can't hear.
Check out the '13 things science hasn't been able to explain'. It's big on digg right now (or it was this morning), and I think it's also on wikipedia. Let's be honest, there is a problem with scientific theory when you can't explain where the missing 90% of the universe is. Or what about the problem of the flat universe? Or perhaps the possibility that alpha isn't a constant? Or that carbon dating uses carbon dating as it's own validation. What about the earths magnetic field's decay rates?
It's just that every time that a hypothesis comes out that brushes against what is 'known to be true', it is immediately discarded. This is not only true of creationist views, but of many things. String theory (which cannot be tested to be true or false) almost never broke into physics, and after that was almost dropped, completely, several times.
I'm not trolling, and I'm not trying to argue with you. I don't have all of the answers; infact, I don't really have any that I could prove to you. Opinions are very hard, if not impossible, to change. Then again, I was an athiest up until a few years ago when I became a follower of Christ. The day beforehand, I knew that I had all the answers. Then I realized that I know nothing about everything. It's a good place to start...
Just out of curiousity [sic], can you verify that it was a DSL modem, and if it was, was it plugged directly into the computer, or was there a router in between?
TCP/IP stacks don't lie - but they also don't tell the whole objective truth. They are subjective to the point of interception. If you trap network traffic inside your network using, say,
Wireshark, you see the stack before the router and/or server. If you view the same packet from outside the network, it will look different (TTL will change, destination, etc...) after each 'hop'.
Ahhh, I stand corrected - I didn't know it was a dial-up connection.
Given that there's no sign of a KaZaA client or music files on the captured hard drive, it seems likely that th identification of the defendant's computer from the ISP's logs and the IP capturing tool output was somehow in error, and they got the wrong victim.
Exactly. The bottom line remains the same and the rest is semantics, I guess.
What I don't get are the hard drive forensics. You would have to have someone very competent to remove a program from Windows and not leave traces. Anyone running Windows knows that program removal tends to leave little bits and pieces behind. Like user settings and registry entries. It shouldn't, but they do anyway. Both McAfee and Norton have removal tools because they don't uninstall properly. Not to mention erasure doesn't actually wipe out data on the drive. The fact that the expert witness states that none of the methods he is using are peer reviewed is a concern.
Agreed. Anyone who has done a bit of forensics work will tell you that, short of physical destruction of the drive, you can reconstruct every last bit of a computer. Unless they wiped every place on the drive that held any information concerning the software in question, several (I think >60 now), you can still find a magnetic 'shadow' which mathematically is never 0. They'd have to remove every trace, (program, links, registry, shortcuts, shell integrations, DLLs, logs, etc...) and write streams over that location of the drive many, many times.
Anyone willing to go to this length would rather burn the drive and ditch the remainders in a lake and put a new one in, knowing the chance of them missing a single detail is still relatively good.
So, I propose anyone with the ability would also be wise enough to just destroy the thing. It is always better to have no evidence, whatsoever, than a piece of prepared evidence which would fail under scrutiny.
An expert who ignores that there is a subnet mask that gives you a full 4th octet under a single IP either hasn't ever worked with networking, or is not aware of the knowledge they are shelling out to first year students in technical institutes; either conclusion is equally damaging to his status, IMHO. If we are to prescribe that an IP address (globally) is a single computer, then we are in serious trouble since we only have 255^4 IP address globally. We should then consider that a good range of those are reserved, further reducing the total amount of IPs available. If he traced a packet to a facility in Redmond (just pulling a large network off the top of my head), I'd like him to tell me which computer this IP is. I think he should find that either a server or a router is using KaZaa, using his logic.
My advice if you're an enthuiast (sic?), install Slackware from ground up - by the time you have it all up and running as you'd like, you'll know oodles more about the workings of Linux since the Slackware installer (for better or worse, depending on your opinion) will NOT hold your hand, at all. Once you get it installed fully, you can use pine from the command line to get the email from Patrick V. telling you about package management (if you actually use packages, I always compile from source, but I'm a software development major...YMMV).
You're going to break your first two installations (if not, you're not toying around enough), but you will learn more while breaking it than if you were breaking any other distro, IMHO. YMMV.
I concur with your logic. And there is a better way to load up your music collection with that big pipe, and still stay legit. Ruckus - free music for almost all college students. I believe that your college has to sign up, but my little known university (Kutztown - yeah, I didn't think you've heard of it...) even has it for students. All you need is a.edu email address to prove that you're a student. I'm not affiliated with ruckus in any way other than being a user.
IMHO there is no reason to risk it when you can get the music for free legally. Just my $.02
I'm exhausted (assembly midterm today and server problems at work) so forgive me if this seems more like a stream of conscienceness, without any citations, than an actual post.
With that preamble aside, my scattered thoughts are as follows:
Jesus says do not judge, but he never said not to be minimally observant!
He says that he is the Son of the Living God and that the fruits of the Spirit will attest to that. How, then, could we say that he has the fruits of the Spirit, unless we consider his actions, words, deeds, and his life, death and resurrection. Simply put, he states that he is the real deal and to test it for yourself. I was an atheist before I came to know Him; but, I found that he backs his claim. Was that to judge him? No.
I believe that the kind of judgement being talked about could be likened to the men who brought a woman, caught sleeping around (or to that effect, see disclaimer at top), and were ready to stone her to death. All of them, just as much sinners as she was, just as deserving punishment under the law, having forgotten that - were ready to take her life. And what does Jesus say? 'Let the man who has not sinned throw the first stone'. I believe in that moment he gives himself permission to throw the first stone (can't remember where, but he later asks if anyone can really accuse him of ever sinning and no one could), since he was perfect in nature and character. All he had to do was throw the first stone and everyone else could have finished the job, so to speak. The only there who could rightfully condemn her, and he doesn't. Thus, we see the grace of God. And, the nature of man, looking past his own woeful shortcomings and somehow assuming the right to be judge, jury, and executioner.
The bible also talks about an open rebuke being better than hidden love (proverbs?), and speaks of rebuking your brother, privately, out of love for him. My best friends in the Body will take me aside and let me know I'm acting like a fool when I am. My friends from before my revelation of Christ merely talk about me behind my back to eachother and then each, in turn comes back to me to tell me what so-and-so has been saying. Is that a judgement on them; no, it's merely a matter of fact I've experienced. But, do I open up to them very much; well... based on my observations, it would not be wise.
I guess to sum up my thoughts on the matter (and to get to bed, at that), judging seems to offshoot directly from pride (let us not forget God resists the proud - take a look at any one of the numerous examples of the prideful in the bible), where we put ourselves 'above' someone else. When we forget that there is not one righteous amongst us. We are told to test the spirit behind things, does it produce good fruit? Is it inspired from love, self-control, or the rest of the fruits of the Spirit that I can't think of this time in the morning? I don't know the people from the article, their motivations, or intentions; that's between them and God, and none of my business.
Slashdot Mirror
In soviet Russia, classifies you!
My friend, you have hit the nail on the head. Well done.
I don't know if you're on the left or right; but, it doesn't matter. Your feelings resonate with mine, perfectly. In the spirit of your post, I won't tell which end of the political spectrum I fall. Although, the very idea that it is quite possible that we're on opposite ends of the spectrum, does amuse me, and strengthen my faith in the tech. community.
root@localhost #
You type your commands here, and if you don't know, the manual is built into the system... man, apropos, info, etc... It suits me fine, thankyouverymuch.
Now when he gets these ideas, before just going and doing it on the production server, I can say "How about I make a VM and we'll see how that goes over", thinking under my breath the words of Keith Moon, "That'll go over like a lead zeppelin". It give me a technology to leverage where I can show that an idea is a Bad Idea, without having to trash the production server to prove my point.
I've even set up a virtual network (1 samba PDC and 3 windows machines), to simulate our network on a small scale to set up proof of concepts. If they don't believe that something will work, I can show them without having their blessing to mess with our network. If it doesn't work, I roll back to my snapshots, and I have a virgin virtual network again.
Does anyone do this? Has it worked out where you can do a proof of concept that otherwise, without virtualization, you would be confined to whiteboard concepts that no one would listen to?
Wait, don't tell me!
You're a doctor aren't you?
Or could he be a dentist...
Nah, it happened to me the other day. Got modded a troll by someone for saying something that rubbed them the wrong way...it happens.
We love that cliche here... in fact, we use it twice on every discussion. What really happened is someone read what you said and used their own mental 'tone', and thought that you were trolling. A single -1 or even 3 won't touch your karma; meta-moderate for the next 3 days and you'll probably be ahead of the game.
Chances are that it'll be disputed when it comes up for meta-moderation, and said modder will no longer be...erm, modding. Well, not as much, at least. Walk it off...we're all human here and sometimes we misjudge a comment, at the end of the day your karma will be fine.
Yeah, in my original I wrote that I thought that it had to be non-polar, but I wasn't so sure about it, so I took it out. I'm fairly sure you're right. I think it takes a LOT of electricity to break a double covalent bond, and still quite a bit to break a covalent bond. So, those electrons are fairly well 'glued' in their orbits... But when you take into consideration that the water will be absorbing heat in the presence of something like 2.5 amps (I'm assuming 300 watts @ 120 VDC - I'm sure this is oversimplified and wrong), I'm sure some change takes place. It's been a good 3 years since highschool (or any) chem., and I didn't take AP. Anyone got an authorative answer to this?
Yeah, 5 minutes is all it took. I think over time they had the same problem with the oil as the did the distilled water - the intimate proximation of the liquid to the wires quickly (relatively) ionizes it. I think the resistance is the key factor. Thus, water was stable for 5 minutes and oil, IIRC was like 3 months or so. Either way, all liquids in contact with circuits will, over time, become conductive. As always, if I'm wrong, please correct me.
Clean (Distilled), water is an insulator. In fact, toms hardware inmersed a computer in water in their article Strip Out The Fans, Add 8 Gallons of Cooking Oil. Just used distilled water, and not tap water - as you shouldn't be using tap water, anyways since it eats away at the parts of a water cooling system.
As long as you don't have free electrons, you won't be passing current.
"You said that windows 98 would be more reliable than windows 95!"
"It is, infact it's 10000 times more reliab..."
BLAM!
And for that note, they'd better be! It would be even scarrier if said company was actually using powerpoint as an effective means of communication to all their 1337 brethren using windows. Then again, the source is for visual studio... Something about this rubs me the wrong way, anyone else?
Completely off topic, but I just realized while thinking of holes in office... is today patch tuesday? Or is that next tuesday?
Oh, yeah, and their program doesn't work with linksys wireless G cards, nor does it understand the '/?' switch from the command line.
I just read that article by McGrath, and you're right, it's exactly what this whole thing is about. Thanks for pointing it out!
Haha, yeah... well, TPB was back up in under 24 hours anyways, IIRC, so that whole thing backfired, anyways. Not to mention the political clout it gave their party.
I know that it doesn't warrant that much investigation...but this is the RIAA we're talking about. Truthfully, the whole thing doesn't warrant the attention that they've already given it. But, they have deep pockets and a fear mentality. It's kinda' like when we get new toys for the army and just have to blow something up to remind everyone to 'stay in line'. So, I'm never very surprised at the lengths they'll go to, in money and time, to press an issue that they know they don't have a single leg to stand on. Imagine how scary they would sound in court:
"We got the results back from our advanced physics lab which indicates that there is a 95% chance that this binary pattern is a 15 second clip of a bootleg Brittany Spears live concert recording. Furthermore, someone overwrote it 37 times trying to conseal it. Lastly, we can tell that this harddrive was placed within 8 inches of an unshielded stereo speaker, for more than 2 months, by the magnetic signature spread over the disk."
I never underestimate their perogative to intimidate at their own expense.
I'm not claiming to be a forensics expert, I'm sorry if I came off that way in that sentence, that was completely unintentional. I also wasn't saying that it isn't prohibitively expensive and difficult, I was just saying that it's possible. It was merely an illustration of our technical ability as of late.
Science...configures the "God couldn't have done it, so I can explain it" trap that you have fallen into.
God resists the proud of heart, but shows mercy and grace to the humble. I'm not saying that you're a proud person, but I do know that Jesus said that all who seek Him will find Him. It seems that most of us find Him when we're broken to the point that we finally acknowledge ourselves for what we are. Seek humbly, and you will find Him. God's promises are as good as gold.
Lately (well, as of the last year), I've become very interested in the doctrine of grace. It's entirely fascinating. And, it also gives a great layout of the Gods 'legal' requirements (He has to follow His own law, otherwise He isn't a perfect judge...Like giving dominion of earth to man, and then coming down as a man in the form of Jesus; legal loophole, if you will, since He can't just 'take it back'.) for faith. It goes a little something like this...
You aren't perfect. God is. You cannot make yourself perfect by doing works, and faith is a work. Your faith in God isn't enough, but His faith in you, is... the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. You are under Grace, not the law - which means since you (Jesus in you) are not under the law, you are able to have a relationship with God. It's not at all about religion; it's about a relationship, that can only happen since Jesus payed for your sins which makes you perfect in Gods eyes. But, as I said, there is nothing that you can do to obtain it; in the end, you can't even save yourself by your faith (work), only God can do it since His faith is perfect.
I'd recommend it as a topic of study for a follower who is of the scientific type. I always, personally, find the topics of law and grace very interesting. Unfortunately you won't find many sunday morning sermons on Gods legal requirements, as it seems to bore the congregation... Ravi Zacharias covers some of this material, I think.
Unless, of course, you immediately dismiss it as 'pseudo-science' before objectively listening. If you aren't listening, you can't hear.
Check out the '13 things science hasn't been able to explain'. It's big on digg right now (or it was this morning), and I think it's also on wikipedia. Let's be honest, there is a problem with scientific theory when you can't explain where the missing 90% of the universe is. Or what about the problem of the flat universe? Or perhaps the possibility that alpha isn't a constant? Or that carbon dating uses carbon dating as it's own validation. What about the earths magnetic field's decay rates?
It's just that every time that a hypothesis comes out that brushes against what is 'known to be true', it is immediately discarded. This is not only true of creationist views, but of many things. String theory (which cannot be tested to be true or false) almost never broke into physics, and after that was almost dropped, completely, several times.
I'm not trolling, and I'm not trying to argue with you. I don't have all of the answers; infact, I don't really have any that I could prove to you. Opinions are very hard, if not impossible, to change. Then again, I was an athiest up until a few years ago when I became a follower of Christ. The day beforehand, I knew that I had all the answers. Then I realized that I know nothing about everything. It's a good place to start...
TCP/IP stacks don't lie - but they also don't tell the whole objective truth. They are subjective to the point of interception. If you trap network traffic inside your network using, say, Wireshark, you see the stack before the router and/or server. If you view the same packet from outside the network, it will look different (TTL will change, destination, etc...) after each 'hop'.
Exactly. The bottom line remains the same and the rest is semantics, I guess.
Agreed. Anyone who has done a bit of forensics work will tell you that, short of physical destruction of the drive, you can reconstruct every last bit of a computer. Unless they wiped every place on the drive that held any information concerning the software in question, several (I think >60 now), you can still find a magnetic 'shadow' which mathematically is never 0. They'd have to remove every trace, (program, links, registry, shortcuts, shell integrations, DLLs, logs, etc...) and write streams over that location of the drive many, many times.
Anyone willing to go to this length would rather burn the drive and ditch the remainders in a lake and put a new one in, knowing the chance of them missing a single detail is still relatively good.
So, I propose anyone with the ability would also be wise enough to just destroy the thing. It is always better to have no evidence, whatsoever, than a piece of prepared evidence which would fail under scrutiny.
An expert who ignores that there is a subnet mask that gives you a full 4th octet under a single IP either hasn't ever worked with networking, or is not aware of the knowledge they are shelling out to first year students in technical institutes; either conclusion is equally damaging to his status, IMHO. If we are to prescribe that an IP address (globally) is a single computer, then we are in serious trouble since we only have 255^4 IP address globally. We should then consider that a good range of those are reserved, further reducing the total amount of IPs available. If he traced a packet to a facility in Redmond (just pulling a large network off the top of my head), I'd like him to tell me which computer this IP is. I think he should find that either a server or a router is using KaZaa, using his logic.
You're going to break your first two installations (if not, you're not toying around enough), but you will learn more while breaking it than if you were breaking any other distro, IMHO. YMMV.
IMHO there is no reason to risk it when you can get the music for free legally. Just my $.02
With that preamble aside, my scattered thoughts are as follows:
Jesus says do not judge, but he never said not to be minimally observant!
He says that he is the Son of the Living God and that the fruits of the Spirit will attest to that. How, then, could we say that he has the fruits of the Spirit, unless we consider his actions, words, deeds, and his life, death and resurrection. Simply put, he states that he is the real deal and to test it for yourself. I was an atheist before I came to know Him; but, I found that he backs his claim. Was that to judge him? No.
I believe that the kind of judgement being talked about could be likened to the men who brought a woman, caught sleeping around (or to that effect, see disclaimer at top), and were ready to stone her to death. All of them, just as much sinners as she was, just as deserving punishment under the law, having forgotten that - were ready to take her life. And what does Jesus say? 'Let the man who has not sinned throw the first stone'. I believe in that moment he gives himself permission to throw the first stone (can't remember where, but he later asks if anyone can really accuse him of ever sinning and no one could), since he was perfect in nature and character. All he had to do was throw the first stone and everyone else could have finished the job, so to speak. The only there who could rightfully condemn her, and he doesn't. Thus, we see the grace of God. And, the nature of man, looking past his own woeful shortcomings and somehow assuming the right to be judge, jury, and executioner.
The bible also talks about an open rebuke being better than hidden love (proverbs?), and speaks of rebuking your brother, privately, out of love for him. My best friends in the Body will take me aside and let me know I'm acting like a fool when I am. My friends from before my revelation of Christ merely talk about me behind my back to eachother and then each, in turn comes back to me to tell me what so-and-so has been saying. Is that a judgement on them; no, it's merely a matter of fact I've experienced. But, do I open up to them very much; well... based on my observations, it would not be wise.
I guess to sum up my thoughts on the matter (and to get to bed, at that), judging seems to offshoot directly from pride (let us not forget God resists the proud - take a look at any one of the numerous examples of the prideful in the bible), where we put ourselves 'above' someone else. When we forget that there is not one righteous amongst us. We are told to test the spirit behind things, does it produce good fruit? Is it inspired from love, self-control, or the rest of the fruits of the Spirit that I can't think of this time in the morning? I don't know the people from the article, their motivations, or intentions; that's between them and God, and none of my business.
Sorry, I get longwinded when I'm tired.