Guess not all yanks are bad

Couldn't sum it up better

> I am a non-believer and as such have had my fill of christian
> dogma and such, how ever I’m just as full of you (other
> atheists) chocking your non-belief down the throats of others.
> Why is this?

Because we care about the society in which we live.

In order for humans to thrive and prosper we need society - an agreed set of rules about how to behave. For example, you can easily see that those societies where people agree not to kill or steal from one another do better than those societies that don’t.

Some rules are fairly easily agreed on - don’t kill, don’t steal - but others are less so - don’t have sex outside marriage, don’t eat pork, don’t allow women the same status as men.

So how can we settle disputes between people over which rules we should adopt?

There are really two ways - the rational and the irrational.

The rational way is to look at the evidence. Does the evidence show that people in general will be better off if women have the same status, less status or more status than men?

The irrational way ignores evidence in favour of a person’s private feelings or ‘faith’.

If you go the rational way, the debate can be settled because the evidence can be evaluated objectively. For example, the debate about whether the earth is flat or spherical has largely been settled because the evidence for a spherical earth is overwhelming.

If you the irrational way, the debate cannot be settled. How can you agree that one person’s feelings are more important than another’s? This deadlock will often end up being settled by violence - as an example, consider the enormous amount of blood spilled by various groups who ‘feel’ that they should control Jerusalem.

Irrationality leads to deadlock and then to violence. Many people who believe in God do so without any direct evidence to support their belief. As such, they are highly irrational. The more irrational people there are in a society, the higher the chance of deadlock and violence. Therefore, promoting rationality (in this case, a state of extreme skepticism about the existence of God) makes for a more peaceful society. That’s why atheists are keen to promote scientific rationalism, and the atheism that inevitably arises from it.

posted on http://www.photopumpkin.com/photo-blog/thank-you-doctor/

Most handy thing I've found in a while

The key combination consists of Alt, SysRq and another key, which controls the command issued:

* 0 through 9 sets the console log level, which controls the types of kernel messages that are output to the console.
* b immediately reboots the system, without unmounting partitions or syncing.
* c reboots kexec and outputs a crashdump.
* e sends the SIGTERM signal to all processes except init (PID 1).
* f calls oom_kill, which will kill a process that is consuming all available memory.
* h, or any key which is not bound to a command, outputs a terse help document to the console.
* i sends the SIGKILL signal to all processes except init.
* k kills all processes on the current virtual console (and thus can be used to kill X and svgalib programs, see below). This was originally designed to imitate a Secure Access Key.
* l sends the SIGKILL signal to all processes, including init.
* m outputs current memory information to the console.
* o shuts off the system.
* p outputs the current registers and flags to the console.
* r switches the keyboard from raw mode, the mode used by programs such as X11 and svgalib, to XLATE mode.
* s attempts to sync all mounted filesystems.
* t outputs a list of current tasks and their information to the console.
* u attempts to remount all mounted filesystems in read-only mode.
* v outputs Voyager SMP processor information.

From wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key

Photo