Of course science and religion can mix and they should!

Let me quote Abdulbaha, son of the founder of the Bahai religion, a growing religious and social movement with more than six million followers:

If religious beliefs and opinions are found contrary to the standards of science, they are mere superstitions and imaginations; for the antithesis of knowledge is ignorance, and the child of ignorance is superstition. Unquestionably there must be agreement between true religion and science. If a question be found contrary to reason, faith and belief in it are impossible, and there is no outcome but wavering and vacillation.

Quite a strong statement for being from a major religious leader a hundred years ago. Also:

This gift [intelligence and reasoning] giveth man the power to discern the truth in all things, leadeth him to that which is right, and helpeth him to discover the secrets of creation

Finally:

Religion and science are the two wings upon which man's intelligence can soar into the heights, with which the human soul can progress. It is not possible to fly with one wing alone! Should a man try to fly with the wing of religion alone he would quickly fall into the quagmire of superstition, whilst on the other hand, with the wing of science alone he would also make no progress, but fall into the despairing slough of materialism.

The only reason that science and religion doesn't seem to mix is that too many religious leaders stick to their dogmas and traditions even in face of human and scientific progress. Religions role in this world is to develop and foster spirituality, morality and selflessness so we can create a fair and just society and it can only do so if it keeps evolving and improving with new knowledge and understandings. Christianity developed and changed a lot in the first few hundred years after Jesus with doctrines and writings being added and removed at a high pace. Why are so many churches of today so hellbent on sticking exactly to the way things earlier were? It's simply not healthy.

Ps. I'm not officially a Bahai, but I consider myself a "friend of the faith".

Hm, 60 PS3s chrunching away at 4 million passwords per second each. Giving a total of 240 million passwords tested each second.

My TrueCrypt volume has a 19 character alphanumerical password, not truly random but nothing you can use a dictionary against. Only lowercase + numbers but still more than 30 characters to choose from.

Given that they knew all this and tried to brute force my password using their PS3s it would still take them more than 1535 billion years...

I think they need to up their game or go a totally different route if they ever want to be able to look inside my harddrive and prosecute me for any of its content before I'm burried in a chest...

Personally I loved the first few versions of Mandrake, but then it started to go south for me...

Each following version I found more bloated and had new weird half-baked configuration tools and broke more easily than the previous version. It was also much harder to find packages of more unusual software for Mandrake than Red Hat due to the smaller community.

At around version 8 I switched back to Red Hat, went from there to Ubuntu and haven't looked back since. To me Mandrake had become the distro that just threw in all the latest stuff with not enough work to get everything to integrate nicely and get stable. I'm a bit surprised to hear others here praise its polish and stability throughout the years...

Today I see no reason for me to switch back to Mandriva although I understand the distro has come far since then. Ubuntu has the largest and most active community, the biggest software repositories and for me (I'm a Gnome user) one of the most polished and well working environments. It also tends to stay stable over time and has a regular 6 months upgrade cycle.

However, I'll be happy to take Mandriva for a spin again when I can find the time and wish them all the best. They are still one of the half-a-dozen desktop distros that I strongly hope survives and stays relevant in the long run and I think they do a great job for being an independent small company with such a small community.

Let me see if I get this right? You haven't even touched desktop Linux at all over the last three years and still you are able to make judgements of it's usability?

I've been using Linux exclusively as my desktop OS for a few years now and let me tell you, the last year (ever since Ubuntu 8.04 came out) has been a really pleasant ride for me. Your mileage might vary depending on your needs and preferences though.