Tears of Jihad

These figures are a rough estimate of the death of non-Muslims by the political act of jihad.

Africa

Thomas Sowell [Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture, BasicBooks, 1994, p. 188] estimates that 11 million slaves were shipped across the Atlantic and 14 million were sent to the Islamic nations of North Africa and the Middle East. For every slave captured many others died. Estimates of this collateral damage vary. The renowned missionary David Livingstone estimated that for every slave who reached a plantation, five others were killed in the initial raid or died of illness and privation on the forced march.[Woman’s Presbyterian Board of Missions, David Livingstone, p. 62, 1888] Those who were left behind were the very young, the weak, the sick and the old. These soon died since the main providers had been killed or enslaved. So, for 25 million slaves delivered to the market, we have an estimated death of about 120 million people. Islam ran the wholesale slave trade in Africa.

120 million Africans

Let's see what some other sources say:

'Tyranny of Clichés' Excerpt: The Truth About the Crusades

. . . Until fairly recently, historically speaking, Muslims used to brag about being the winners of the Crusades, not the victims of it. That is if they talked about them at all. “The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineff ectual response to the jihad—a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war,” writes Bernard Lewis, the greatest living historian of Islam in the English language (and perhaps any language).5 Historian Thomas Madden puts it more directly, “Now put this down in your notebook, because it will be on the test: The crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world.”6

At first the larger Muslim world didn’t much care about the Christian reclamation of Jerusalem and the Holy Land. The jihad to repel the crusaders didn’t start in earnest until the European forces pressed on into the Muslim Holy Lands approaching Mecca and Medina. Even then the Muslim world considered the fight to reclaim Jerusalem a sideshow. The real fight was in the East, where caliphs were rolling up victory after victory in the old Byzantine Empire. In 1291, the Muslims expelled the last of the crusaders, and all remaining Christians and Jews in the Islamic world lived as second-class citizens (though often better than Muslims or Jews might have in many parts of Christendom). By the sixteenth century, Islam’s empire covered all of North Africa, Asia Minor, Arabia, and much of southern Europe. Had Islamic forces not been turned back outside the Gates of Vienna, Christianity itself may not have survived. (The battle ended in victory for the Christians on September 12, but it was the day before, marking the apex of Muslim rule, that would stick in the minds of many Muslims for the next 318 years.)
   

The Truth about Islamic Crusades and Imperialism

The Status of Non-Muslim Minorities Under Islamic Rule

The Golden Age of Islam is a Myth

a rough estimate of 270 million killed by jihad.

The atheist Communists killed 100,000,000 people in the last 100 years.

In other words you are too lazy to learn. If you are an 'end user' who is just getting things done that is acceptable, for you the computer is just a tool. If you are in the IT game you are worse than useless and should be kept from any position of responsibility, certainly never allowed to make any decisions.

This is a fast moving industry, and if you are posting on slashdot odds are you aren't just a random gamer, you work in the business. That means that it is your job to KNOW stuff about NOW, not blindly just keep reinstalling the exact same junk you learned a decade ago. Even on windows. That is what seperates the ones who got into computers because they thought it was a good job and those who see it as a career choice. What have you tried this week? What have you learned this week? These skills become obsolete damned fast, you better be replacing them.

And once you adopt that mindset of constant learning it just makes sense to broaden your knowledge to more than one platform. I have Win7 on this laptop to play games on, Fedora for everything else, Debian on my Mythtv, OpenWRT on my gateway, etc. That forces me to keep up to date on most of the major streams of development. Except for Apple, and frankly I could care less about wearing those chains.

Dunno, without knowing exactly what his planned use is, odds are a COTS solution is something to consider. A cheap tablet or phone that can be hacked to get a bit of I/O or that has USB host mode support just might be the fastest and cheapest way to solve the problem. After all he wants a bitmapped touchscreen and driving that is outside what I'd want to be doing on most AVRs, especially ones available in DIP packages.

Actually, not invading would probably have killed more people. Saddam's long term average for killing Iraqis was higher than what occurred in Iraq after his fall. Now Saddam is gone and terrorism is way down, so objectively the Iraqis are much better off with Saddam falling.

Reminds me of how people used to speak of Iraq - the coalition was losing an unwinnable war until the final bitter taste of victory.

The reason it's beyond you is that you really don't understand what is going on. Here is some starter material. Yes, they do hate our freedoms - including the freedom of religion, and self governance under the Constitution. Their ultimate goal is to restore the Caliphate, which existed up until ~ 1924, and conquer the world for Islam.

bin Laden's 'letter to America'
Goal - coerced religious conversion, replacement of Constitution with Sharia law, with an end to drinking, gambling, fornication, etc., etc.. Noncompliance means they will keep attacking.

What al-Qaida Really Wants

Given your handle, you might find this interesting.

Actually they do pay and train them.

The vast majority of which were killed by terrorists and insurgents who did things like explode car bombs in busy markets, and use truck bombs to level entire villages.

If Saddam had stayed in power and killed at his long term average, there would probably have been 50-100% more dead than there were. Saddam is out of power now, and the terrorist and insurgent violence is down by something like 90%. US combat forces are out of Iraq. Iraq is a functioning, if troubled, democracy. And now the Iraqis are rebuilding, putting up schools and libraries instead of another batch of enormous palaces for Saddam.

Your facts are not in order.

Pakistan is blockading NATO due to an air strike that kill two dozen Pakistani soldiers at a border outpost. The Pakistanis reportedly made the unfortunate "mistake" of firing at US and Afghan commandos which they sometimes do when they forget which side they are supporting. Pakistan is demanding an apology for the incident, and is also using it as an excuse to try to jack up the transit fee from $200 to $5,000 per truck.

The overwhelming majority of non-combatants being killed in Afghanistan are being killed by road-side bombs placed by . . . guess who. . . the Taliban. The Taliban also visit murder and massacre on the various tribes and villages. Unlike NATO, the Taliban deliberately targets innocent non-combatants.

As to drone strikes . . .
Pakistan Says Drone Strikes Have Been Effective

Major-General Ghayur Mehmood spoke to a group of Pakistani reporters on a rare trip to Miran Shah, the administrative center of North Waziristan.

The Pakistani general says that information the military has gathered from its sources suggest most of those killed in drone attacks are hardcore militants, and the number of innocent people being killed is relatively low.

The official paper distributed among reporters says that there have been 164 drone strikes in the militant-dominated region of North Waziristan since 2007, killing 964 "terrorists". There were 171 al-Qaida fighters among those killed, mostly belonging to central Asian and Arab countries.