Your government (I assume you are American) does provide foreign aid to Israel. It also supplies money and/or arms to a lot more unsavory countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Sure, feel free to criticize Israel, but don't be hypocritical about it.

From the Israeli Declaration of Independence:

THE STATE OF ISRAEL will be open to the immigration of Jews from all countries of their dispersion; will promote the development of the country for the benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew Prophets; will uphold the full social and political equality of all its citizens, without distinction of race, creed or sex; will guarantee full freedom of conscience, worship, education and culture; will safeguard the sanctity and inviolability of the shrines and Holy Places of all religions; and will dedicate itself to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations.

From the Hamas charter:

Ye are the best nation that hath been raised up unto mankind: ye command that which is just, and ye forbid that which is unjust, and ye believe in Allah. And if they who have received the scriptures had believed, it had surely been the better for them: there are believers among them, but the greater part of them are transgressors. They shall not hurt you, unless with a slight hurt; and if they fight against you, they shall turn their backs to you, and they shall not be helped. They are smitten with vileness wheresoever they are found; unless they obtain security by entering into a treaty with Allah, and a treaty with men; and they draw on themselves indignation from Allah, and they are afflicted with poverty. This they suffer, because they disbelieved the signs of Allah, and slew the prophets unjustly; this, because they were rebellious, and transgressed.

This is the law governing the land of Palestine in the Islamic Sharia (law) and the same goes for any land the Moslems have conquered by force, because during the times of (Islamic) conquests, the Moslems consecrated these lands to Moslem generations till the Day of Judgement.

Any procedure in contradiction to Islamic Sharia, where Palestine is concerned, is null and void.

It is necessary to instill in the minds of the Moslem generations that the Palestinian problem is a religious problem, and should be dealt with on this basis.

Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people. "May the cowards never sleep."

The Islamic Resistance Movement consider itself to be the spearhead of the circle of struggle with world Zionism and a step on the road. The Movement adds its efforts to the efforts of all those who are active in the Palestinian arena. Arab and Islamic Peoples should augment by further steps on their part; Islamic groupings all over the Arab world should also do the same, since all of these are the best-equipped for the future role in the fight with the warmongering Jews.

"The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews." (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).

No, it's not "fine" and not everything Israel does should be defended. But we must ask why Israel is singled out when there are so many far worse atrocities going on. And if you think it has nothing to do with the fact that the majority of Israelis are Jewish, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

Or to clarify GP: Israel uses missiles to protect its civilians. Hamas uses civilians to protect its missiles.

Israel's not very efficient at committing genocide. Boko Haram in Nigeria has killed far more people. ISIS in Syria too. Etc.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a minor regional territorial conflict. But because of huge anti-Israel sentiment among UN members, combined with a healthy does of Islamic racism, this minor conflict that could have been settled years ago is kept festering because the Islamic bloc at the UN sees it as a useful tool to weaken Israel. It's pure cynical geopolitics fueled by Islamic fascism.

It *used* to be that the religious issues were just a distraction, but that is no longer the case. Islam is reverting to what it was originally: A fascist political movement aimed at world control, masquerading as a religion. It is utterly impossible to compromise with hard-line Muslims because their very religion rejects the idea of compromise with non-Muslims. Non-Muslims are to be killed or subjugated; that is prescribed directly in Islamic religious writings.

On the Jewish side, there has been a similar move to hard-line positions, though to a less dangerous degree than in Islam. The hard-line Jewish extremists want to take over the whole of "Eretz Yisrael." They are not interested in subjugating the entire world.

LibreOffice can do most of that, with the exception of integrated calendars. Claws Mail has a plugin that can generate and accept Outlook invitations. Also, our CRM tool, (SugarCRM) has a usable shared calendar; it was pretty easy to hack to to generate Outlook-compatible invitations for our external partners.

We use Subversion for revision control and collaboration. My first choice would have been git but I realize there are limits to what you can expect non-technical people to learn. :)

I don't believe there's anything magical about MS Office that couldn't be done with open-source alternatives. MSFT just does a very good job of marketing. Also, people are lazy and go with the familiar.

I'm curious as to what documentation the CA's required for you to prove that you own localdomain or 192.168.2.22.

In my small company, we all use Linux on the desktop. Here are our answers:

Time to learn a new system: It took my employees maybe a day to learn LibreOffice (they already new MS Office). Anyone who needs more than a day to come up to speed with casual use of LibreOffice is too stupid to be employable, IMO.

Reintegrating mail onto a new client platform: Well, I just said "Here's your email program" and gave them Claws Mail. They were up and running in about 30 minutes. Again, anyone who cannot learn a simple graphical mail client in a day or so is too stupid to be employable.

Keeping patches up-to-date: One word for you: apt-get

"How one school district threw millions of dollars down the drain"

Ooh, shiny.... must be useful for educational purposes....

The problem with Egypt, Syria, Libya and Tunisia is they've suffered over a thousand years of Islam. That has left their population with a fatalistic outlook, their leaders corrupt and their drive and innovation sapped. The Internet is not going to free the billion humans who live enslaved to Islam. Unfortunately, only the people themselves can do that by throwing off the stultifying oppression of Islam, and that's not happening any time soon.

Actually, writing down your password is a good idea as long as you keep it in your wallet. People understand how to protect their wallets. Posting it in a public place is probably not such a good idea.

There are some sites where it truly doesn't matter.

I don't believe that. You may think it doesn't matter, but when it comes to identity theft, any little crumb of information may be useful to an attacker. And if you use the same weak password across a whole slew of supposedly "unimportant" sites, an attacker may be able to piece together a lot of information about you... enough to surprise you with cell phone bills you didn't sign up for, credit cards in your name, etc.

But I sure as fuck am not going to put ALL of them into ANY app or single program - there are backdoors built into routers these days, you expect some start-up (or even established) "password keeper" doesn't have that possibility? I am concerned for your common sense.

Woah, woah, woah, chill out!

I have the complete source code for my password manager. And guess what... I've even read the source code!

It uses "openssl bf" to encrypt (that's the Blowfish cipher). In spite of all the warnings about OpenSSL holes, I don't believe anyone's yet found a problem with its Blowfish implementation, and though Blowfish is old and there may be weak keys, I don't believe it has serious vulnerabilities especially when only used to encrypt small files.

If you don't have Internet access, then remembering your password for a web site is moot.

If you have only insecure Internet access, then you don't do anything important unless you can use HTTPS and make sure you validate the certificates.

That means they are both weak to being cracked/tampered with, and should your device be stolen, you are without all your passwords.

To defend against the first attack, you choose a strong master passphrase and you make sure your password manager uses a properly-implemented and secure encryption algorithm such as AES. To defend against the second attack, you regularly back up your password database. It's not rocket science.