Many institutions are using Shibboleth for unified single sign-on between both internal and external web application. Shibboleth is an authentication engine and, as its backend, it can use a variety of sources for authentication including LDAP, a SQL database or other resources. It simply deals with authentication, so more advanced configurations, such as systems which allow grace logins after a password expires, may require more customization. The following tutorial shows how to use Shibboleth with a Novell e-Directory server that allows grace logins after a user’s password has expired.

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Shibboleth is an Internet2 project used to implement identity authentication and authorization across multiple domains (sometimes known as a single sign-on). Shibboleth also allows federated authentication, which allows an organization or institution to let a user on one domain to authenticate to another domain. This is common in academic settings where one university may want to allow users from another university to use their services using that first university’s authentication system. A plug-in for Shibboleth known as uApprove provides an approval screen so users can see what information is being shared before being logged into a remote system. uApprove is designed to work with MySQL, however this tutorial shows how it can be easily modified to use Microsoft SQL Server.

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Blaise Pascal, a French mathematician from the 1600’s, once proposed that people should live their lives as if there were a God, because by doing so, they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. Although Pascal never intended this statement as a proof, it’s often used by religious apologists as an argument for the belief in God. It places the assumption of a god and the afterlife into a weighted game around such beliefs, instead of first looking at the benefits of a good life in relation to the possibility of a god.

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“We’re fighting them terrorists there, so we don’t have to fight them here,” is a common nonsensical catch phrase used in many variations during the Bush presidency from 2000 until 2008. In the past few years, the exact opposite has happened. United States policy and military training has left the war theaters of the middle east. With military style weapons and training given to SWAT teams in municipal police departments around the country, infantry tactics are often used domestically now against US citizens in non-violent drug crimes. In some cases, this has lead to accidental deaths, police brutality and the destruction of lives for non-violent peaceful citizens.

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The concept of supporting our troops has become its own mantra in the United States. We talk about those who “sacrifice” and “defend our freedom,” in such that we should honor them for their service. We go as far as to place yellow plastic magnets on the back of our vehicles as a symbolic gesture of our support (with the money typically going to some manufacturing company in China). Even liberals have taken up the “Support our Troops” mantra by tacking on “Bring them Home” in a way to attach a degree of appeasement to the staunch advocates of continued war. But the reality is not some pretty idealized view of American bringing democracy and freedom to the world. The reality is that as a nation, we’ve accepted blanket statements and embraced nationalism without taking time to discern the facts of our history and understand all the wrong our government does in order to sustain our standard of living.

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I recently got into a fight with one of my closest friends. It was entirely my fault and my place to apologize. We moved forward together from this moment as friends, for which I’m glad. At one point she told me she hoped the grace and forgiveness she showed would reflect that of her faith as a Christian.

I would hope that as human beings, the compassion we show for others is not a dependence or reflection of our faiths. For all faiths have text that can be taken to invoke both acceptance and indignance, pacifism and aggression, condemnation and redemption, devastation and hope. Never should religious ideology define us as people, but rather we as individual should define the role of religion in our lives.

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I had a professor for my Psychology of Growth and Development class who told us that as people, we must “…either grow or we die.” It’s a slight hyperbole, but his point is clear. Human beings are the most adaptable animals on our planet. Our abilities to grow both individually and as a society are what have helped us, as a species, both overcome and thrive in a constantly changing world.

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Doubt is often given a negative connotation. Doubting ourselves or our abilities can hinder the potential of what we are capable of doing. But doubt is also important, if not pivotal, in learning more about our world and in seeking new ideas in science. Without doubt, we would never challenge that which is established in order to discover new possibilities. Doubt is the keystone of progress in science and it is also the antithesis of faith.

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The Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched by NASA in 1977. Its original mission was to visit and photograph Jupiter and Saturn. As Voyager 1 departed the solar system, at the request of Carl Sagan, NASA commanded the craft to take a photograph of the Earth from a distance of several billion kilometers. This photograph became the foundation for Sagan’s 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. The following excerpt from the first Chapter in Sagan’s book offers one of the most amazing and humbling perspectives about the human race and our place in the universe.

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There is somebody out there for everybody. That’s the cliché, or a variation thereof, we tell each other during times of loneliness. And there is somebody for everybody, except for that one person. You know the one. That man or woman who totally screwed you over, who lied to you, who cheated on you and did everything wrong when you did everything right in that failed relationship. That person is without redemption, has no soul and is not deserving of anyone ever again. It’s similar to that person who cut you off in traffic. They are a horrible person who deserves to die, even though you’ve made the exact same mistake before while you were driving.

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