FWIW - maps.google.com still works in OS 6 on Safari, complete with driving, public transport, and walking directions as well as street view. The response lags a bit with zoom and drag gestures, but it some ways it's nicer than the old app which reinforces how out of date it was. Check it out, you may decide to upgrade if it works for you.

Well here's my prediction. The licensing fees are going to get much higher. The hardware will stagnate as Cisco spends time "Ciscoizing" it and then milking it for every last cent. One other thin, Meraki's engineers are about to get a taste of what happens when a company run by engineers (as Cisco once was) turns into a company run by MBAs (as Cisco is).

The instant you liken a political system to Stalinists and Nazis that is not actively slaughtering millions of it's own people, you loose all credibility.

tr;dr - Too ridiculous, didn't read.

No, the US was explicitly created as a secular nation founded on religious freedom. No mention of God or Jesus Christ in the Constitution nor the original "bill of rights." It has nothing to do with what percentage of the population is Christian, it is not a Christian government. If it were, that would be establishing a religion and the 1st amendment explicitly forbids that. The Founding Fathers were children of the Enlightenment, they saw the abuses of mixing Governance and religion and wanted no part of it.

A secular government is the only way to truly have freedom of religion. So while the US population is 80% Christian, it is not a Christian nation. There is a big difference.

I might be missing the sarcasm, but clearly this is not true. There will be all sorts of struggles for resources, land, governmental ideologies, etc. But the passing of "magical thinking" and the related beliefs that people should be shunned, jailed, tortured, or murdered because of what they wear, eat, think, believe, say, or love seems like a good thing to me.

I'm an Atheist and I agree with you almost 100%, though I get pretty strident at times.

The reason is that some Christians are being very successful in the US at forcing their beliefs on others through the legal system. Abstinence only sex-ed, restricting access to birth control, denying gay marriage, trying to redefine the US as a Christian nation, removing Thomas Jefferson from text books, putting disclaimer labels on text books or even adding "Intelligent Design" as an alternative theory (that has never made a single verifiable claim, nor led to a single discovery.) As an Atheist, the influence that fundamentalists have over people's day to day lives is appalling.

Right now, in parts of Africa that are suffering an AIDS epidemic, Christians and Catholics from around the world are promoting abstinence only "education" and spreading lies and misinformation about condom usage. Again, that is appalling and will result in much more spreading of AIDS, and much more suffering. I know that it is not representative of all Christians, but in the US the moderates all seem to be giving the fundamentalist a pass.

So what your left with is a bunch of pissed off Atheist because apparently no one religious wants to question the effectiveness our morality of other sects of their religion.

I'm not sure I follow your point. It could be my bias, but I don't see anybody trying order around the fundamentalist. It looks to me like the right-wing has embraced the fundamentalists. I see fundamentalists getting disclaimer labels about evolution and "intelligent design" in text books. I see fundamentalists passing laws forbidding gay marriage (funding efforts in states they don't even live in). I see fundamentalists restricting women's access to contraception and abortion.

Who's telling the fundamentalists to be subservient? They are forcing their beliefs into over people's day to day lives. No one is trying to force them to use contraceptives. No one is forcing them to have abortions. No one is forcing them into homosexual marriages. No one is forcing them to swear allegiance to a God they don't believe in, nor deny them their belief in their God.

This is a ridiculous claim. Stalin and friends were not motivated by there lack of belief in a God, they were psychopathic bastards following an ideological dogma. They had the writings of Karl Marx as their sacred books. They were killing everyone that they thought threatened their dogmatic truth, or they didn't like, because of their interpretation on Communism [1]. Their beliefs in Communism where a replacement for religion and in competition with religion. Atheism itself is not a replacement for religion, it makes no claims except "I don't believe there is a God." No sacred texts saying who goes to Heaven, who goes to Hell, who gets to live and who we must kill because of what they eat, love, say, wear, do, or believe.

And to preempt the whole Hitler thing, he was raised Catholic, alluded to God and a higher power all the time and seemed to believe all sorts of mystical stuff. He may not have been a "true" Christian, but he was no Atheist. And his foot solders were all Catholic and Lutherans. Again, all the killing was in the name of the Fatherland and patriotism fueled by ideology and dogma.

[1] I have no idea how close Stalin and friends actions were aligned with Marx's writings. It doesn't matter, all that matters is a group of people intent on enforcing their will on others through violence, in support of an unquestionable dogma.

That's all well and good, now how do we get my fellow citizens to stop voting for idiots that believe that the Bible is the literal word of God, that the US is a Christian nation, and that Satan (or God) created the earth with fossils in place to confuse (or test) people's faith?

The 14th Amendment was driven by smart religious and non-religous people. The laws against interracial marriage, Gay marriage, and the good old-KKK are driven by stupid religious people. Maybe by some non-religous people as well, but none of them are supporting their messed up believes with their non-religon.

Nope, I owe my current freedoms to smart people. Some of whom overcame the literal interpretation of their religious texts, some who were not religious.

There was a time when everyone was at least outwardly religious. To be otherwise was not an option as it led to things like being stoned, tortured, exiled or shunned. I think virtually every "reformer" in Christianity was a borderline (or outright) heretic and they were always resisted until after the Enlightenment. Those wonderful Puritans that came to the US had the nasty habit of burning witches and hanging Quakers. Yup big believers in their liberty and right to persecute. You forgot the Civil War, religious apologists love to point to the Christian movement in the North. Of course they never mention that the South is just as Christian (actually more so.) Same book, different interpretation. Yay religion for it's unambiguous goodness!

And yet God, Christ, and the Ten Commandments are exactly nowhere in the Constitution. The only mention of religion is that the Congress shall make no law respecting establishing a religion or prohibiting people's free exercising of religion.

And then there is the fact that the founding father's had a range of beliefs from Diest to Christian, Jefferson was explicit about the separation of Church and State and even made his own non-mystical Bible by cutting out all the silly bits, the The Treaty of Tripoli, etc...

Agreed, they keep bearing false witness, lying about everything from the founding of the US to the validity of modern science. Idiots indeed.