Great points, from the political/social/morality view.
From a technical point of view, to assess anonymity, as a feature and/or a bug, one must look closely at the underlying transport protocols and mechanism.
If that mechanism does not inherently (or intrinsically) identify an entity, then allowing anonymity in higher-level protocols is a feature; otherwise, it may be a bug, in the sense that insisting on providing it may well introduce bugs.
Expanding on the former, it's important for any communications protocol built on top of TCP/IP to not require identification of an entity above and beyond what TCP/IP inherently provides (mainly, IP addresses of the communicating entities).
Otherwise, all sorts of problems arise involving those higher-level identities, such as forgery and additional points of failure. (The only way to be sure a given entity is who it says it is is to check an external data base, which might not be available or might be buggy.)
Expanding on the latter, it's difficult to provide anonymity in a protocol when the lower-level protocol requires identification to work. E.g. it's difficult to anonymize one's IP address when communicating via a protocol built on top of TCP/IP.
Again, such anonymization can be done, but difficulties are encountered beyond the non-technical ones, such as additional points of failure (an anonymizing agent might be unavailable to facilitate communications between two entities that are both available and able to communicate directly with each other) and bugs introduced by unexpected reliance on correct identification in underlying and/or related protocols (which is why, for example, the FTP protocol is often "special-cased" in stateful firewalls, NAT boxes, etc. -- it doesn't rely solely on a single established TCP connection to work, it also uses IP addresses, or identifiers, in ways that have to be tracked and potentially modified by anonymizers/translators).
So, the "new Internet" I want to design is one that relies less, not more, on centralized agents (such as data bases, including DNS) and brittle assumptions (such as reliable voluntary identification of entities), in comparison to today's Internet -- not so much for political or social reasons, but because I believe the result would be a more viable, robust Internet.
On top of that, I believe it would actually be easier to add support for the "usual suspects" (encryption, DRM, whatever) as desired by entities that actually are willing to employ them, in line with the end-to-end principle, leaving "most" of the rest of the Internet out of those decisions and, therefore, letting them avoid the potential problems that arise from having to support them for everybody, all the time, even when they're not desired for certain communications.
Was their world created when you decided to create it
More to the issue at hand (when was our world, or universe, created): was their world created when you decided to create it, or earlier than that, based on their understanding (even if "perfect") of the likelihood that the initial state you chose for their universe was actually preceded by earlier states (viewing their universe as an automaton, much as we view ours), especially given the likelihood that their consciousness must have arisen long (in their sense of "time") after your choice of initial state was established?
Here's a simpler example. Take the game of chess. Imagine the pieces have some semblance of consciousness of their existence, a consciousness that develops only as a given game is played, to the point where, based on their experiences, they are able to formulate theories about the rules of the game itself, and thus reason, based on what they can recall of their own history, about their own "Big Bang".
Now, we know what the "usual" starting point is for a proper game of chess. Let's assume, for purposes of this discussion, that there is no earlier state that is possible (although, in chess, technically there could be -- though pawns can't go backwards and most other pieces can't advance past them from behind, knights can, so there could be a "start minus 1" position in which a knight starts out placed in front of the row of pawns and moves to its usual starting place to create the "start" position).
And let's assume the pieces remember enough, and learn enough quickly enough, to formulate a theory that the actual starting position we typically use is their "Big Bang".
Does that mean it is necessarily the starting position?
Of course not. You could set up a chess board with the pieces in a subsequent position, even one that can not be reached from the "proper" starting position (and thus not be a proper subsequent position) -- such as one in which a pawn is on its own first row -- and, by the time the pieces were "conscious enough" to formulate their theories, they might have insufficient recollection of their own history to be sure that there was no time prior to that (atypical) starting point you chose.
So their reasoning about a "Big Bang" could still be theoretically quite legitimate, but that still would not deny the fact that you, as a deity figure vis-a-vis their world, created their "world" in a shorter period of their time than they reasonably believed.
In essence: you'd still be their deity, even if their science, based on their understanding of, and reasoning about, the world you created for them, led them to believe in fallacies.
Our universe is, according to modern science, not terribly different. It operates according to certain rules (it is essentially an automaton, composed of numerous subautomatons, whether chess pieces and squares, or quarks/strings and space), it has underlying randomness ("pieces" move at the direction of an entity unknown and unknowable to the pieces themselves -- this distinguishes chess and our universe from Conway's Game of Life, in which there is no randomness once the initial position is set), and it allows pieces some degree of interaction.
Obviously this analogy gets stretched when considering just how chess pieces would be convinced of their history, be able to learn and reason about their world, etc.
In our universe, however, scientists tell us that all our experiences, thinking, and so on is potentially solely the result of the very same automatic processes that govern what is external to "us" as individuals.
So "whatever" created our universe definitely, according to our science, would, in the chess analogy, has the power to not only set the initial pattern of the board, but the initial patterns of thought -- the degree o
Really, of all the people involved in all the open-source projects out there, I think Linus' personality is the most destructive.
Ummm, NO.
And, while I've had a disagreement or two with Linus, having worked on a few highly-visible open-source projects (and run a less-visible one) myself, I believe I can speak with more than the usual amount of authority on that.
(But I admit my experience is at least several years old at this point.)
My consulting-business domain name, jcb-sc.com, got so slammed by spam and joe jobs, starting a few years ago, that it convinced me to switch to hosting it on my own server (dynamic-IP Comcast, yeah, I know;-), rather than my original dialup ISP, so I could do a "better" job of filtering.
Among my many experiments and observations, I set up a few "spamtrap" addresses for harvesting on my web sites -- using white on white to be transparent to visual users, and tags saying things like "Don't send mail to this spamtrap" for anyone. Of course, those spamtraps quickly went on spammers' lists.
But so did a lot of other nonexistent addresses that I never in any way advertised or publicized. They were made up, apparently out of whole cloth, by spammers!
Earlier this year I decided to disable "unknown-user bouncing", which is the default for qmail, so my server wouldn't flood the rest of the 'net with the same sorts of joe-jobs that were such a problem for me (and aren't so much these days, probably because most of the Internet is now much better at filtering spam and/or just dropping lots of mail, most of it spam).
Instead, I diverted all mail for unknown users into a single Maildir that, months and thousands of mails later, I finally got around to looking through in an organized fashion (but still have a lot of older mail to check out...someday). I did catch a few legitimate mails to "slightly wrong" versions of proper usernames! The rest I looked at and designated as "Junk" -- that is, actual spam, not bounces of spam.
Recently, I wrote a script to go through all that "Junk" and call out the email addresses that were sent more than N (10, I think) messages, so I could designate those addresses as "spamtraps" on my system and/dev/null them (or maybe someday use them to generate my own RBL on the fly).
As a result, I now have nearly 500 "spamtrap" addresses for jcb-sc.comalone. That is, in addition to the handful of "legit" addresses, there are nearly 500 addresses the spammers have invented, apparently out of whole cloth, including some doozies, like a5cbdgk9ecd1fae3, alexiobpyjkh, close_bugid1_bugid2_aix, g77_lstat_0g (particularly amusing, since I wrote g77), heavyhosting:netransom, iamjustsendingthisleter (seen that used for one of my other domain names too), mcintoshzmop34fdg, office:spain:ruralphodysseus, and z_sin:g (and I think "z_sin" was the name of a library function in libf77/libg2c).
So I don't worry about publishing my email addresses anymore. Any spammer that sends mail to one of them is likely to send it to at least a few of those 500 or so spamtrap addresses around the same time, and there are likely to be enough similarities in the mails that my MTA can easily detect all of them as likely spam and not accept them. (Similarities might be "obvious" -- I get a fair amount of SMTP injections, which my "special" SMTP server ultimately reject, that try to deliver a single message to several spamtraps as well as one or two legit addresses at once; suggestive of a zombie, when multiple SMTP connections each delivering to spamtraps come in from a particular IP address; or less obvious, as when the content is roughly similar, but includes apparently-randomized portions.)
I've come to believe (with less than 100% certainty) that the "solution" to the spam problem is not to focus so much on identifying its sources, blocking them, challenging them (e.g. in court), detecting spam via automated content analysis, and so on -- although those techniques obviously have some utility -- but, rather, to use the same environment that makes spamming cost-effective for spammers, except changed in certain ways (some subtle, some maybe more overt) so the same environment becomes much more hostile to spammers, just as my domain names are "hostile" in that they nicely accept entire emails from most spam sources and th
I agree — SPF is not a silver bullet, and using it is probably unwise, though publishing SPF records (other than just "?all") for those who insist on using it seems reasonable to me.
After my first response, I did notice this gem that you wrote:
In my proposal, property would be fenced off from those not wanting to participate, because those who want a system of private ownership of natural resources are thieves who are stealing those resources from the rest of us.
This is a particularly telling quote, because nowhere did I say that those who didn't want to participate would necessarily all be "those who want a system of private ownership of natural resources". Yet you define all non-participants as "thieves", apparently even if they merely want, but do not necessarily have, private property. (Was your wording intentional?) So they are thieves because they are outside your system and do not therefore share a stake in your property -- which is why I posed the problem in the first place.
If that's true, then the word "thief", as you use it, has little or no utility when it comes to defining desireable outcomes. A "thief" in your view would be either someone who believes in private property ownership under any system other than yours or does not wish (or is not able) to participate in your system, regardless of their views.
So I must dismiss any pertinence of the term "thief", which you insist on continually throwing around, as it has little or no value in constructing a system. Which leaves us with the question of how to handle the problem of non-participation in any system that purports to justify itself based on "equity", vis-a-vis the question of whether non-participants are, by virtue of the existence and predominance of that system, inherently disadvantaged either in relation to the system's nonexistence (difficult to assess) or when compared to those who do participate in the system (which becomes a matter of the system either being truly equitable or not).
In fact, if you look at even entirely voluntary systems controlling infinitely reproducible, and thus basically ephemeral resources, such as software, you'll see that it's often the case that people can and will disagree with a system that controls a thing even while agreeing with the basis (reason) for that system. For example, many people agree with the ideal of free software (GNU, GCC, Apache, etc.), but it happens, often enough to be worth pondering, that "turf wars" and even splits occur within the development and/or support communities (GCC versus EGCS comes to mind). And this is over software that is freely distributable, not over limited real property, where the stakes are presumably so much higher.
What you have done in your quote, however, is flat-out state that anyone who does not accept your particular system for equitable property distribution and thus wants to opt out as a participant is also someone who goes against your goals for such equity -- which might or might not be true -- and thus is a "thief".
Regardless of whether it's true (after all, there's no point in trying to divine the motivations of any "outsider", and certainly no fence you wish to construct will be able to do that), what your response illustrates is that you are, in fact, in favor of inequitable ownership of real property, at least in the case where the "owner" is a corporate entity of some sort, and you are in favor of fencing off that real property so only those who make up that corporation get to enjoy it, regardless of whether that fencing-off results in a larger-scale inequity. (Yes, I realize that you would further qualify your favoring such inequity only when the corporate owner implemented your system, but what's the utility of that, if you don't represent a nearly-unanimous view among all mankind?)
It's at that point that I wonder just how your system is different from what we have today, if you accept that any individual person is also legitimately considered a "corporate interest" insofar as he or she has an "identity" within the larger collective s
Now, how about you answer a question, as neither you nor anyone else I've discussed this with has been willing or able to refute my major points. Just one question, but it is a big one. On what basis do you justify private ownerhsip of natural resources?
You seem to have misunderstood the thrust of my questions. I was not saying the present system is better or more desireable than your proposed system.
I was simply asking how your proposed system could, or would, actually work in practice, such that it accomplishes what you say it would.
Your answers failed to address most or all of the questions. For example, saying the citizens of planet earth would decide what is equitable or would vote in an equitable way utterly fails to address, to name just one concern, how that takes into account those citizens who would not agree with the majority decision regarding "equity".
There are many other practical problems with your proposal that perhaps you could address as well, if you had been willing and able to lay a foundation for how the system actually worked. (For example, if two people to whom land was previously "equitably" distributed privately chose to exchange some portion of the shared land for some other benefit they considered tangible but that wasn't "equitably distributed" by your proposed System, wouldn't that mean that real property itself was no longer "equitably distributed"? How would your system detect and correct this?)
But it was worth a try anyway. Note that, in the future, if you don't like being asked allegedly "loaded" questions about your proposed systems to correct some cosmic imbalance you perceive exists in the universe, you shouldn't post commentary that strongly suggests you have already formulated reasonable answers to them.
Also, you are probably aware that there are plenty of places on planet earth right now where people interested in "owning" (in a practical, if not legal, sense) some real property and living out their lives can go -- places where they would daily gather fruits and nuts, or perhaps hunt local game, for survival, though have little or no access to what some might call the fruits of modern civilization (which is substantially, if not entirely, based on notions of real-property ownership by individuals and corporations that you certain consider unethical).
Yet there is hardly any stampede of people towards such places. Indeed, from what I've read on the subject, people who try them out with the best of intentions usually end up fleeing them later.
This is among many reasons why I accept, despite reservations about "inequitability" and more-serious ones about the violence that seemingly is necessary to support it, our present property-ownership system. It allows individuals (and corporate entities, which I view as legal fictions vis-a-vis an individual human being's God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) to cooperate and/or compete for whatever sorts of property they most value at any given time in their lives -- real, intellectual, monetary, equities (shares in for-profit corporations), and so on.
Like you, I've long considered ways to improve or replace the system with something better. But I have been unable to do so, because I can't come up with one that assures global equity of property distribution across an entire populace that satisfies everybody, from those who believe children are property of parents (that is, a child that is born is not suddenly given an equal "share" of land that is accordingly taken away from others in some piecemeal, perhaps rather destructive, fashion, but only shares in what the parents already "own" under a system as the parents see fit) to those who are zealous advocates of animal rights (who do not accept that any human or collection of humans has any more "rights" to a piece of land than any animal, from primates on "down" the Darwinian ladder, to the extent the advocate accepts th
I see two possible solutions to this dilemma. One, a system that distributes an equitable amount of real property to everyone, so everyone is a party to the contract. Two, a system of democratic control of property where everyone is a party to the contract. To me, these are the only ethical ways of dealing with the issue of scarcity in regards to real property.
Both of your solutions require "a system" of control -- either explicit ("democratic control of property") or implicit ("distributes an equitable amount...") -- which requires substantial input (definitions of "equitable", of "everyone", of "contract"), output (the control, including assignments with regard to which property is used how, when, and by whom), and internal beauracracy.
So, would these systems themselves own property? (But "property is theft", you say!) If not, where would such a system exist, how would it conduct its business, exert its influence (control and police property boundaries as required), etc.?
Who would make the decisions on behalf of the systems' inner workings -- who would decide who gets to vote on "democratic control" issues (children? fetuses? really smart chimpanzees?), for example, and how they vote? An "elite" of some sort? And who would elect and subsequently oversee those elite? Meanwhile, would those elite get special favors, such as particularly valuable property? If so, would that be "equitable" or "ethical"? If not, what would be the incentive for anyone to put themselves in such a position, if it was policed to a greater extent than the "common man", but yielded no extra benefits?
In fact, how would any such system balance the desires of person X to trade his property with person Y, given that X prefers Y's property even though X's property might actually be larger, because X's is in a desert and Y has oceanfront property in Boca Raton, FL? (Well, that pertains to your first system, which distributes property "equitably", even though you seem to believe "property is theft" -- so would everyone be a thief in that system?)
Or, taking the second system, what about people (or even animals) who would simply refuse, for whatever reason, to participate in the system you've proposed? Would they, or would they not, be "fenced off" from the property "claimed" by the collectivist system you propose? If fenced off, isn't that the same as the property that is "theft" in your view, except insofar as the "owner" is a faceless corporate amalgamation you call "a system of democratic control"? If not fenced off, how valuable would the collective's property be if anyone or anything outside the system could use, exploit, even plunder the property?
And when you say "these are the only ethical ways of dealing with the issue of scarcity in regards to real property", why do you believe any particular human being's definition of "ethics" should determine how an entire planet's land mass is distributed among the humans who populate it? And, why do you believe real property is "scarce"? If each and every person presently on this planet was given one whole acre of land, how big would that collective land mass be measured in terms with which we might be more familiar:
The contintential United States
Alaska
Texas
New Hampshire
Washington, DC
That is, which of the above is the smallest that still contains six to seven billion acres of land?
Finally, are you aware of any experiments that put your approaches into practice? How do they work, how well do they work (how inclusive, ethical, etc. are they in practice), and how long have they been working? Are they serving as examples for others to try out? Do they require violence to enforce rules? Is the property collectively owned more, or less, productive than that owned by capitalists?
I know there are a lot of questions here, but I think they naturally arise due to your proposal to replace each and every socioeconomic, political, and religious system on the planet with your idea(s).
SMTP is here to stay as the standard method for (somewhat) reliably routing messages between people on unaffiliated networks.
Perhaps true -- but it will someday be replaced. (And I say this as the author of a Fortran compiler.;-)
So, replaced by what kind of beast?
I view SMTP as designed in response to two fundamental "realities" circa the timeframe in which it was designed:
The vast majority of email that was sent was reasonably expected to be "desired" by its recipient.
(The ARPANET/Internet of its day was composed mostly of academics and others who used it as a tool to do research, not to spread vermin, sell stuff, or circulate chain mail further.)
People (in the USA at least) were accustomed to the US Postal Service, and wanted the "new-fangled" system to mimic that system's behavior.
(In particular, aside from the postage issue, which doesn't always apply anyway, we are accustomed to dropping an item into a mailbox and expecting The System to either deliver it to its destination, or return, or "bounce", it back to us, assuming we've recorded the return address correctly. That makes sense, because we don't necessarily have another copy of the item to send if we can't be sure it was received, and The System was viewed as a single central authority that could be relied upon.)
Expectations are much different now. Most email sent is not desired by the recipient -- the vast majority is spam, scams, and vermin -- and people are accustomed to the "information-age" ability to quickly and reliably reproduce information, so they understand that a "lost" email isn't a problem so long as they have the original copy to retransmit and they are able to determine that it might indeed have been "lost".
Are you really sure no new system that takes into account modern "realities" would be able to fundamentally change the balance of power between email senders and recipients such that illegitimate bulk senders are, for a change, the ones left out in the cold, ultimately replacing SMTP?
(I'm not; I'm designing just such a system, initially for use by sysadmins trying to do stuff like configuring SMTP and SSL to work right. Something has to let them send emails when today, or tomorrow's, email system ain't working!;-)
the only thing you can really verify is the IP address of both machines (if you have pipelining turned off)
Why do you have to have pipelining turned off? Pipelining doesn't change the fact that a working TCP connection must be established, which requires handshaking underneath the hood (which verifies the client IP), and that there is an initial content-level handshake (server greeting followed by client EHLO and server's EHLO response) that must occur before the client may use pipelining, which means the client must see the server's EHLO response before sending more data (or that the server not notice or care if the client is "presumptuous", aka an "early talker"; if it does, it might assume the client is spamware). That greeting/EHLO/EHLO-response exchange requires that the server have the correct IP address of the client. In particular, a client may not use pipelinining until it sees that the server's EHLO response includes the keyword "PIPELINING", which means the server's EHLO response must actually reach the client, so it must have the correct IP address.
A protocol built on datagrams (such as DHCP) instead of TCP connections (like FTP, HTTP, and SMTP) would, however, not necessarily require the client to expose, or even have, an IP address that the server could reliably use. Is that what you were thinking of? If so, I think a good general solution is for any protocol, whose users might want to verify IP addresses on both ends, to allow the server to require a client to return a unique cookie at the content level (that is, augmenting whatever happens underneath the hood for, say, a TCP connection) in order to continue the conversation.
(I'm thinking about these issues because I am designing a new email system that could make good use of datagrams to do many email exchanges in a "lightweight" fashion. So if I'm wrong about this, I'd really like to know that sooner rather than later....)
I was born an atheist. I never had god beliefs to begin with, at least that I remember. Was it because I ran around denying the truth of God? No, it was because I simply never added that belief to my list of beliefs, and after hearing about it, never saw any good reason to. How can my non-belief be described as "religious?"
I think I see the problem: you're not actually an atheist, you're an agnostic. You don't believe that there IS no God; you simply haven't chosen to believe that there IS. (I remain a skeptic, myself; but it's much easier for me to believe in some God due to my religious upbringing, which considers "Truth", for example, as a synonym for God, since I believe in the concept of objective Truth, reality, etc., or at least am unwilling to discard such a belief and conduct myself accordingly.)
Seems reasonable to me to say "agnosticism" isn't a religion; it isn't the belief in a deity, or in the nonexistence of a deity. It's the lack of acceptance of either belief, which presumably includes the unwillingness to subscribe to any system of beliefs that spring from either belief.
As far as religious proscriptions on murder: at least some belief systems (like JudeoChristian beliefs) have such proscriptions! (Whether individual atheists have them is irrelevant, since individual Christians have them as well, even if the sects to which they belong have similar proscriptions more, or less, strongly.)
Other than that, I see little to object to in your post. Of course atheists have been persecuted for their non-belief; human nature (not theist religion, else atheists wouldn't share in this tendency, but they do) is such that intolerance for the different beliefs of others manifests itself in a wide variety of nasty ways, as does envy (and other emotions) of those who hold similar beliefs!
I recieved unexpected email in 2002 from my father whom I had not heard from in almost 12 years.... I'm kinda a little happy that "the market" wasnt the arbitrating factor if I recieved that mail or not
So, in your opinion, the Catholic Church was once a murderous regime? To you think they would beg to differ? My point is that Christianity purports to be an ideology.
I believe history, and the Church itself, are both quite clear on that; no, I don't think "they" would be to differ, though I am not a Catholic and don't speak for the Church; and "Christianity" no more purports to be an ideology than a brick purports to be a suitable material for building.
Atheism, on the other hand, is not an ideology, not a set of beliefs or anything. If you want to criticize particular people for their hostility to religion, that's one thing. But to criticize them as atheists makes little logical sense.
Take that up with the atheists who I've seen and heard frequently exercise self-congratulation that their beliefs make them superior (in some way I've yet to fully comprehend) to those who are religious.
And please explain to me why there's a constant stream of atheistic invective against organized religion, especially Christianity (though, oddly, not Islam, but then I don't have as much experience with forums in which Islamic views are strongly represented). After all, there's no reason for any atheist to give a fig that someone believes in one God, versus believing in one million deities, or none at all; and, even if there was such a reason, there's no atheistic directive to "preach the gospel", try to "convert" others, etc.
Yet, I get far more atheists "knocking on my door", insisting I "adopt" their religion, than I do Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and other "religious" types combined. (That takes into account the Internet, of course; why would any atheists even bother participating in a discussion on prayer, anyway? I don't participate in discussions of whether rosary beads actually do any good, to pick an example I know basically nothing about!)
I can -- and have -- go among the deeply religious of various faiths (whether in places of worship, in public places, or in a prison), be open and honest about my religious beliefs, and pretty much get, and certainly give, nothing but respect for others' beliefs.
But the nastiest, filthiest invective I experience, when it comes to insulting my religious beliefs (whether directed at me personally, or just ridiculing beliefs I recognize as my own, in general), pretty much comes 100% from atheists.
Does that not mean those atheists are basically acting as if they are a religion? Or does that just make them a bunch of jerks, in your view? (Maybe they're just a subculture of atheists that, to make a wild guess, is in, or freshly out, of college, after having been "indoctrinated" by left-wing professors and other kooks to attack Christianity as a means to undermine Republicans? Darby's sig, "Murder a Republican", is consistent with this speculation. But the utter lack of response by atheists to their "own kind" speaking improperly on their behalf, and with disrespect, to and about others, suggests that this subculture is, in practice if not precisely, representative of atheists in general. Is this guy misguided, in treating both atheism and Christianity as religions? Do atheists frequently gather together and promote, or "peer-pressure", each other to tolerate the religious beliefs of others, as do Jews, Christians, and Muslims, to name just a few religions with which I'm familiar?)
Also, keep in mind that one of the fundamental distinguishing characteristics of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, at the times and in the contexts where they began, were not that they believed in a God, but that they believed in one God.
Whereas, the cultures from which they largely sprang were "immersed" (and probably greatly stifled by) the belief in many gods, with many conflicting, confusing demands, which (of cour
The leaders of the Inquisition could at least make some sort of plausible case that they were acting on those ideas, acting as Christians should.
No more than the leaders of various murderous regimes could make a similar case that they're acting on the "facts" (which are stated outright by people like Darby) that "religion is evil" and must be "wiped out".
Or, as a friendly neighbor put it when, in a polite dinner conversation, I mentioned that I finally felt I had begun
to grasp what the Bible actually said, "Do I have to worry about your coming to my house with a gun and killing me?"
The fact that he's Jewish isn't the point: it's that, in the minds of many, it is religion (as in those who believe in God, as you yourself define it) that is the problem.
And there is no substantial distinction between going from "Jews are the problem with our society" to the Holocaust, and "Religion is the problem with our society" and a similar sort of result -- as history has already shown.
Atheists affirm all SORTS of things.
But not as atheists, and I don't know where you could possibly get the idea I'm "just so obsessed with whether or not someone affirms [my] particular metaphysics", as you put it.
It's readily apparent, to anyone watching such discussions, that, regardless of how you depict atheists, there is a substantial community of them who spend inordinate amounts of time and energy incessantly criticizing Believers, especially Christians. That, despite having no "core beliefs" that would drive them to do so, other than their (very strong) belief that there is no God, and their communal (and IMO rather smug) sense that the religious are idiots and/or nuts who must somehow be kept in their place, or removed to another.
In doing so, these people expose themselves as a community of just the sort you deny exists, or can exist. Regardless of whether they're a minority of those who are truly "atheists", they exert a disproportionate amount of control over the collective sense of what atheism is, and how atheists should behave.
In that sense, they're hardly any different from that minority of atheists that managed to exterminate tens of millions of innocent lives -- or that minority of Christians that managed to sanction the Inquisition, and similar horrors.
So, I don't care whether someone affirms (or denies) my particular metaphysics at all.
But when atheists walk, talk, and act like the radically religious they claim to despise, it becomes pretty silly to talk about atheism as if it is not, in practice, a religion like any other...
...unless and until, as I tried to point out earlier, it is not religion that is the "problem" in the first place, but something else, something that happens to find religion (among other things, like communities of smug atheists;-) easy to hijack for its own ends.
In any case, atheists would do well (and be more intellectually honest) to stop using labels like "religion" in discussions such as this, and instead be more specific about exactly which behaviors they are criticizing, promoting, etc.
Please note that I often used "atheist" and "atheistic" in my previous posts in a fashion parallel to how "Christian" was being used: to describe the whole of the (essentially religious) society that adheres and/or claims allegiance to the ideal.
In that sense, saying "Christians were responsible for the Inquisition" is similar to saying "Atheists were responsible for the atrocities of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot". They each were, and weren't, in similar ways, though the numbers (thousands versus tens of millions of victims) certainly differ.
There is no common content to atheism.
Denying not only that God exists (or that gods exist), but also that those who believe otherwise are at best misguided, at worst evil (see Darby's earlier post for an example of how atheistic thinking ends up going down that road), seems about as "common" as necessary for the purpose(s) at hand.
All atheists have values and ideologies of their own.
Yeah, that certainly can't be said about Christians now, can it?
;-)
But your observations strike me as essentially correct. They pertain to advantages and disadvantages of a coherent philosophy: atheists (in the pure sense, not in the "hijacked" or "hijacking" sense) don't have to worry about being in violent disagreement with each other, because what would they disagree about? On the other hand, they have little incentive to agree on anything and, in particular, to create anything (especially anything requiring substantial self-sacrifice, perhaps including dependant life, like children) as an outgrowth, demonstration, celebration, or symbol, of that agreement.
So we end up with all the infighting (and outfighting!) surrounding Christianity, but that goes hand-in-hand with building spectacular (and often protective) churches (which the Bible, especially Jesus Christ, does not really direct the religious to do!), forming productive and reproductive societies, feeding the hungry, giving to the poor, and so on (those in response to religious, that is, Biblical, directives, though politically-active atheists prefer to focus their attentions on the Pledge of Allegiance and "In God We Trust" rather than weightier matters, such as government endorsement of marriage as an institution, the welfare state, Social Security, and so on, all of which have purely religious origins -- and which politically-active Christians conveniently ignore when they claim that our society is "going downhill", as if the nearly-worldwide, wholesale adoption of ideas that used to be ridiculed as "Christian" is unacceptable when not labeled as such!).
In short, it seems our universe is designed to reward affirmation, rather than denial, as a precursor to reproduction.
Hmm. I find your posts to be insufficiently coherent to respond to them. I can no longer tell whether you are saying the Bible has little or nothing to offer (which is what you seemed to be saying a few posts ago), whether the religions that promote it are the problem (which is not something I, or anyone else in this thread, has denied), whether "Christian America" is evil (well, you do seem to be saying that, but, as I asked, compared to what, and by what or whose definition of "evil", given that you reject the Bible and Christianity, as well as any deity-based system of thought), or whatever.
What is clear is that you've decided to make your attacks personal, and impute to me beliefs and stances that I do not hold and/or have not taken.
That's rather strange, since there are clear indications that you do in fact hold to "core beliefs" that are basically the same as mine, including the Golden Rule, which is a fundamentally religious belief.
It's also self-defeating, since you are attacking someone who believes so strongly in some of the same "core beliefs" you yourself hold, that he has withdrawn from his two (and only) life-long memberships in Christian churches (a branch as well as its worldwide church) specifically because of the conflicts -- between "religion" and the actual scriptural texts -- those core beliefs came to represent. (But I still attend and support the truly Christian aspects of those same churches.)
In the Old Testament, a choice is given to the people: between blessing and Life, or cursing and Death. I have consciously chosen to stick with blessing and Life, because, among other things, it is simply more productive to focus on creating and inspiring the few with whom I come into contact, than to feel I must curse, and wish for or otherwise seek the death of, any person, institution, or ideology that I feel contradicts mine.
And it is now clear to me that this choice, albeit presented as a "one-time thing", or at least a "one-people thing", is in fact the choice each and every person must make, as the Information Age presses upon all of us, presenting us with as full a world-wide panoply of good and evil, blessing and cursing, life and death, as any of us can possibly cope with.
So, one cannot expect to "straddle" that choice in any productive way, at least, not for long. The cause for cursing will always be present here on earth; the "need" too great, the demands (especially of those so skilled at cursing) too large, to allow for a full and proper pursuit of the path of blessing.
The Bible is a very compelling account of the realities of this choice, and what happens to those who choose one, the other, or both. In that light, I'm much more "impressed" with its wisdom than I ever was expected to be as a child or even a young adult -- but I suppose that's to be expected once one decides to accept or reject a text for oneself, rather than based on the direction or guidance of others.
Based on your conduct here, it seems you've chosen the path of cursing, substantially if not entirely. That does not mean you "deserve" to die, or anything like that; it does mean you've chosen to not bless and multiply ideals that contain, in and of themselves, that which is needed to further bless and multiply.
The good news is, you've done and said nothing worse than many others who've been on the same path, and probably no longer than anyone else -- others who've suddenly "seen the light" and switched to blessing and life -- so you can make that decision as well (depending on which parts of the Bible you believe, and how you interpret them).
Blaming modern Christians for things like the Inquisition is _almost_ as silly and backwards as blaming atheists for Stalin.
I'd say much sillier, because of the huge difference in time, and the fact that there aren't, today, substantial numbers of Christians (and their institutions) defending the Inquisition(s), whereas there are people and institutions today who defend (passively -- by not bringing up uncomfortable truths about, e.g., reporting on the USSR at the time of Stalin and Lenin -- if not actively) Communist and other atheistic mass-murder.
(In particular, you'll probably have an easier time finding Christians who are willing to admit that their religion was hijacked for use in atrocities like the Inqusition than Atheists who admit that their ideology was hijacked for use by Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.)
In any case, your points about Christianity are essentially correct, but I think I should make clear, and believe you are on the same track, that what we are really talking about is not so much that "Christianity" or "atheism" are evil (or not) ideologies, rather, the extent to which a given ideology, or way of life, helps or retards moral and spiritual growth among its adherents, as well as others with whom they come into contact.
For me, the question is "complicated" (that is, not as trivially answered as by someone like Darby) because the denial of false gods -- including the "God" of so many religious sects, including those describing themselves as Christian -- is a) sometimes necessary to free the enslaved and b) occasionally assisted by atheists.
Putting aside mystical issues (such as whether God exists) and historical ones (such as whether Jesus existed), the issue really boils down to whether a given ideology offers a sustainable basis for human civilization.
As "attractive" (due at least to its simplicity) as Atheism is, there's little evidence it provides such a basis, but it does, in my view, serve a useful role as a sort of offshoot of the scientific method, which clearly has offered such a basis.
The relevance is the simple fact that it's laughable to claim any sort of consistent morality based on the bible.
Nonsense. It is now quite clear that you indeed have not bothered to understand the Bible.
Neither atheism nor denial of any gods caused anything of the sort. Blind adherance to ideology did. Of course when you call it that, all religious murders fall right into the same bucket.
People with your worldview, especially your disdain for the Bible and anybody who believes in its teachings, have
been murdering the "religious" for millenia.
It doesn't matter whether you're worshipping a magical fairy man in the sky or the state. As soon as you claim some srt of absolutism to your ideology, then it really doesn't matter what the specific details are.
Agreed. And your ideology appears to be as absolute as anyone else's, based on your rhetoric here.
In any case, if the specific details don't matter, why are you singling out the Bible? Why don't you go on a similar rant about the Koran, and Muhammed, and Islam? Or are we to simply assume you mean to include Islam among the religions you reject, along with the intelligence and/or sincerity of its adherents?
Pol Pot or the Pope. From the perspective of one who isn't part of their club, there isn't much to choose between them.
Really? You honestly believe any Pope -- never mind the one installed at the time of Pol Pot -- was just as murderous (or, hey, within an order of magnitude) as Pol Pot?
Amazing, given how few people who spend their whole lives studying it would ever make the claim that they "understood it just fine".
That's because they insist on assuming it's both consistent and divinely inspired. Once you lose those baseless assumptions, there's not really much confusing about it.
Or, perhaps they possess a quality you've never even considered: humility.
Again, I find it amazing that you actually appear to believe that you've completely internalized a huge, thousands-year-old text to the point that you can completely dismiss its practicality and handwave its well-documented status (as the most-read book in history) and effects (the basis for the most successful civilizations in history), as well as anyone who claims to have read it but admitted they don't fully understand it.
(Much of which can be inferred from the Bible texts themselves anyway.)
Hardly. Point me to the chapter about how the various groups of Bishops picked certain books to claim as "god's word" to use against their rivals for control of the empire in order to declare them heretics and murder them. Oh wait, that's not there. It would call the entire thing into question.
Again, relevance? The key points, that there are differing views of What Happened, which are entirely obvious to anyone reading the Bible and expecting literal, logical consistency. It doesn't really matter, then, just how inconsistent reports and/or explanations came to be found in the Bible; to the reader, the fact is, they are there, and unabashedly so.
Communism as practiced in the USSR was a religion.
Communism is religion, period. So is all science. So are your claims. You have no basis to claim that the Bible is inconsistent other than the religious belief that there even exists concepts like "consistency" or "coherency" in the first place.
Atheism is nothing of the sort. Failure to accept your *particular* flavor of delusion does not a religion make.
You might be describing Agnosticism, but not Atheism. Atheism denies
Judging by your sig, you're not one to talk about what's in the Bible. You either haven't read it, haven't understood it, or just don't care.
So all that genocide wasn't really there?
Relevance? Atheism (or, at least, a very strong denial of the Judeo-Christian God) killed what, maybe 100 million people in the 20th Century alone?
I read it and understood it just fine.
Amazing, given how few people who spend their whole lives studying it would ever make the claim that
they "understood it just fine".
I also read the history of how it came to be.
(Much of which can be inferred from the Bible texts themselves anyway.)
There are certainly some good mesages you can pull from among the bad and constradictory ones. Leave out the whole religious nonsense that has people killing each other over trivial interpretations and it might have some real value.
That isn't "religious nonsense", unless you count atheism and Communism as "religion"; and, at least in the New Testament, it is pretty clear how the Biblical (Christian) religion had progressed to the point where non-violence was not only preached, it was suffered for by its adherents.
Mostly though it was designed to keep the masses down and the rulers on top.
Quite the opposite, by my understanding. Not only does it explicitly deny the "divinity" (and thus infallibility) of any human, animal, plant, or other material "royalty" (usually a King; these days a committee, such as a government or the UN), most every tyrannical government in history has preferred to prevent its people from being able to both read and understand the Bible.
Seems to me that if the Bible did as you claimed, governments would require it to be read and understood by their own people -- especially the more tyrannical, totalitarian types.
Instead, such governments demand readership and/or worship of "The Communist Manifesto" and the like.
Of course, you knew all that though. Otherwise why you would question my knowledge is a mystery in itself.
If you don't want your "knowledge" questioned, you might keep your opinions to yourself, then?
I must admit, it's sad to see that Dan hasn't patched the qmail-smtpd portability problem. I don't think you can call it anything but a bug.
If it's a vulnerability, it's a *very* unlikely one, for the simple reason that almost no configuration on earth gives a single qmail-smtpd 2GB+ of memory.
It's not a vulnerability in qmail-smtpd that I can see. It is one, probably only theoretically, in qmail-popup (which does the username/password authentication for POP3 access in qmail).
But it is a bug, and I agree it (and similar bugs) should be fixed in an official release of qmail (not just a patch, which is what netqmail is).
Note that I wrote the web page, to which I link above and to which the GP linked, about ten months ago, and it has been widely read and linked to. But nobody has yet seen fit to hire me (or even request of me as a volunteer!) to fix the pertinent bugs, nor have I bothered to do so myself!
I think that's consistent with your impression of qmail, security-wise: people who really look at the big picture realize that complaining about qmail's "vulnerabilites" is, at best, a waste of breath; nobody wants to also waste money on trying to "solve" non-problems.
So, we see that omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence are all three perfectly impossible and ultimately meaningless properties.
By your own "logic" (which is breathtakingly self-satisfied, besides being wrong), then, logic, mathematics, and physics, which are claimed to be omnipresent and/or represent (or describe) omniscience, at least in any meaningful sense, are either impossible, or are falsely invoked by those who so advocate them.
And, since mathematics, for example, cannot be omnipresent, nor omniscient, nor omnipotent, there necessarily exist places and times where 2 + 2 != 4.
As you've also ruled out the omnipresence (etc.) of logic, your own logic is not only potentially faulty (even if not demonstrably so by humanity), all of science is nothing more than faith, since it is entirely dependent on logic for it to be at all distinguishable from religion in the first place.
Further, since only logic tells us that, there not being any such thing as God, there is therefore no such thing as God, and logic is not omnipresent nor omniscient, atheism is false, since it denies the existence of something that might, in fact, exist, and it does so based solely on logic (which can be false at any point in space or time, or at all points) and belief (that God doesn't exist), the latter being, in and of itself, not fundamentally any different from the belief that God does exist, except, at least, the religious needn't concern themselves with science (and, indeed, mankind has flourished for millenia with little or no apprehension of science, while distinguishing itself from all other species by having spirituality and religion).
So, congratulations! You've not only defined away the possible existence of God (or at least certain forms of Him, as described by his own Creation), you've defined away science, logic, and atheism!
"....and most of those optimizations are disabled as soon as the compiler sees an unconditional jump..."
Wow! You got that EXACTLY backward!
I hope that was a typo, but I'm guessing not.
Anyway all the stuff gets disabled with a conditional jump! An unconditional jump is nothing, a CPU can optimize that very well - in fact it's not even executed in the standard sense of the word, it's optimized away at an earlier stage.
No, it wasn't exactly backward; he was referring to the compiler, not the CPU.
Anyway, all the above generalizations are false, but true enough for common specific situations that programmers interested in performance should take them into account.
Many compilers do their most, best optimizations at the "basic block" level, and might (or might not) treat any GOTO (conditional or unconditional) as "ending" a basic block, thus disabling optimizations that might otherwise "work" across them, had "more elegant" code been used instead.
(I've worked on the internals of such compilers. Especially in the Fortran world, where ancient but important benchmarks have already been "hand-optimized" to use lots of GOTOs, it has been tempting to include a "code lifting" pass to the optimizer that replaces GOTO's with "more elegant" code for the subsequent optimization phases, including breaking things up into basic blocks, to do a better job on.)
Also, whether a GOTO is explicit or implicit might or might not affect how a compiler views it.
In C, the "goto" keyword is 100% explicit, as is "longjmp()". "if", "while", "return", "switch" with 'natural' "break"'s at the end of each "case" are all nearly 100% implicit. "continue" and "break" in 'unusual' places are examples of grey-areas that compilers might or might not treat just like explicit "goto"'s in terms of optimization.
CPUs are another matter. Conditional branches do tend to be bad juju for most modern CPUs (RISC and CISC built in the past 20 years), but sometimes unconditional branches also can introduce problems compared to code that simply "flows through" using repeated conditional tests but not conditional GOTOs (JMPs or branches or whatever).
Hence the addition of instructions like CMOV (Conditional MOVe) to RISC sets like SPARC (working from memory here, apologies if I've gotten technical details wrong).
Point being that a decent optimizing compiler these days should not assume GOTO means "stop optimizing", and should not blindly generate JMP/Branch instructions just to avoid extra compares or moves, or even fetches from memory, unless it is sure the savings outweighs the costs (say, the CPU really won't hiccup, or it saves an extra Icache line crossing, or something like that).
Slashdot Mirror
Great points, from the political/social/morality view.
From a technical point of view, to assess anonymity, as a feature and/or a bug, one must look closely at the underlying transport protocols and mechanism.
If that mechanism does not inherently (or intrinsically) identify an entity, then allowing anonymity in higher-level protocols is a feature; otherwise, it may be a bug, in the sense that insisting on providing it may well introduce bugs.
Expanding on the former, it's important for any communications protocol built on top of TCP/IP to not require identification of an entity above and beyond what TCP/IP inherently provides (mainly, IP addresses of the communicating entities).
Otherwise, all sorts of problems arise involving those higher-level identities, such as forgery and additional points of failure. (The only way to be sure a given entity is who it says it is is to check an external data base, which might not be available or might be buggy.)
Expanding on the latter, it's difficult to provide anonymity in a protocol when the lower-level protocol requires identification to work. E.g. it's difficult to anonymize one's IP address when communicating via a protocol built on top of TCP/IP.
Again, such anonymization can be done, but difficulties are encountered beyond the non-technical ones, such as additional points of failure (an anonymizing agent might be unavailable to facilitate communications between two entities that are both available and able to communicate directly with each other) and bugs introduced by unexpected reliance on correct identification in underlying and/or related protocols (which is why, for example, the FTP protocol is often "special-cased" in stateful firewalls, NAT boxes, etc. -- it doesn't rely solely on a single established TCP connection to work, it also uses IP addresses, or identifiers, in ways that have to be tracked and potentially modified by anonymizers/translators).
So, the "new Internet" I want to design is one that relies less, not more, on centralized agents (such as data bases, including DNS) and brittle assumptions (such as reliable voluntary identification of entities), in comparison to today's Internet -- not so much for political or social reasons, but because I believe the result would be a more viable, robust Internet.
On top of that, I believe it would actually be easier to add support for the "usual suspects" (encryption, DRM, whatever) as desired by entities that actually are willing to employ them, in line with the end-to-end principle, leaving "most" of the rest of the Internet out of those decisions and, therefore, letting them avoid the potential problems that arise from having to support them for everybody, all the time, even when they're not desired for certain communications.
More to the issue at hand (when was our world, or universe, created): was their world created when you decided to create it, or earlier than that, based on their understanding (even if "perfect") of the likelihood that the initial state you chose for their universe was actually preceded by earlier states (viewing their universe as an automaton, much as we view ours), especially given the likelihood that their consciousness must have arisen long (in their sense of "time") after your choice of initial state was established?
Here's a simpler example. Take the game of chess. Imagine the pieces have some semblance of consciousness of their existence, a consciousness that develops only as a given game is played, to the point where, based on their experiences, they are able to formulate theories about the rules of the game itself, and thus reason, based on what they can recall of their own history, about their own "Big Bang".
Now, we know what the "usual" starting point is for a proper game of chess. Let's assume, for purposes of this discussion, that there is no earlier state that is possible (although, in chess, technically there could be -- though pawns can't go backwards and most other pieces can't advance past them from behind, knights can, so there could be a "start minus 1" position in which a knight starts out placed in front of the row of pawns and moves to its usual starting place to create the "start" position).
And let's assume the pieces remember enough, and learn enough quickly enough, to formulate a theory that the actual starting position we typically use is their "Big Bang".
Does that mean it is necessarily the starting position?
Of course not. You could set up a chess board with the pieces in a subsequent position, even one that can not be reached from the "proper" starting position (and thus not be a proper subsequent position) -- such as one in which a pawn is on its own first row -- and, by the time the pieces were "conscious enough" to formulate their theories, they might have insufficient recollection of their own history to be sure that there was no time prior to that (atypical) starting point you chose.
So their reasoning about a "Big Bang" could still be theoretically quite legitimate, but that still would not deny the fact that you, as a deity figure vis-a-vis their world, created their "world" in a shorter period of their time than they reasonably believed.
In essence: you'd still be their deity, even if their science, based on their understanding of, and reasoning about, the world you created for them, led them to believe in fallacies.
Our universe is, according to modern science, not terribly different. It operates according to certain rules (it is essentially an automaton, composed of numerous subautomatons, whether chess pieces and squares, or quarks/strings and space), it has underlying randomness ("pieces" move at the direction of an entity unknown and unknowable to the pieces themselves -- this distinguishes chess and our universe from Conway's Game of Life, in which there is no randomness once the initial position is set), and it allows pieces some degree of interaction.
Obviously this analogy gets stretched when considering just how chess pieces would be convinced of their history, be able to learn and reason about their world, etc.
In our universe, however, scientists tell us that all our experiences, thinking, and so on is potentially solely the result of the very same automatic processes that govern what is external to "us" as individuals.
So "whatever" created our universe definitely, according to our science, would, in the chess analogy, has the power to not only set the initial pattern of the board, but the initial patterns of thought -- the degree o
Ummm, NO.
And, while I've had a disagreement or two with Linus, having worked on a few highly-visible open-source projects (and run a less-visible one) myself, I believe I can speak with more than the usual amount of authority on that.
(But I admit my experience is at least several years old at this point.)
Ah, like the Hurd?
Cool! But don't you mean "and leave a nonnegative result", since 1 + 3 = 4, 4 + 5 = 9, and so on?
(At least I think some people interpret "positive" as greater than, not greater than or equal to, zero.)
My consulting-business domain name, jcb-sc.com, got so slammed by spam and joe jobs, starting a few years ago, that it convinced me to switch to hosting it on my own server (dynamic-IP Comcast, yeah, I know ;-), rather than my original dialup ISP, so I could do a "better" job of filtering.
Among my many experiments and observations, I set up a few "spamtrap" addresses for harvesting on my web sites -- using white on white to be transparent to visual users, and tags saying things like "Don't send mail to this spamtrap" for anyone. Of course, those spamtraps quickly went on spammers' lists.
But so did a lot of other nonexistent addresses that I never in any way advertised or publicized. They were made up, apparently out of whole cloth, by spammers!
Earlier this year I decided to disable "unknown-user bouncing", which is the default for qmail, so my server wouldn't flood the rest of the 'net with the same sorts of joe-jobs that were such a problem for me (and aren't so much these days, probably because most of the Internet is now much better at filtering spam and/or just dropping lots of mail, most of it spam).
Instead, I diverted all mail for unknown users into a single Maildir that, months and thousands of mails later, I finally got around to looking through in an organized fashion (but still have a lot of older mail to check out...someday). I did catch a few legitimate mails to "slightly wrong" versions of proper usernames! The rest I looked at and designated as "Junk" -- that is, actual spam, not bounces of spam.
Recently, I wrote a script to go through all that "Junk" and call out the email addresses that were sent more than N (10, I think) messages, so I could designate those addresses as "spamtraps" on my system and /dev/null them (or maybe someday use them to generate my own RBL on the fly).
As a result, I now have nearly 500 "spamtrap" addresses for jcb-sc.com alone. That is, in addition to the handful of "legit" addresses, there are nearly 500 addresses the spammers have invented, apparently out of whole cloth, including some doozies, like a5cbdgk9ecd1fae3, alexiobpyjkh, close_bugid1_bugid2_aix, g77_lstat_0g (particularly amusing, since I wrote g77), heavyhosting:netransom, iamjustsendingthisleter (seen that used for one of my other domain names too), mcintoshzmop34fdg, office:spain:ruralphodysseus, and z_sin:g (and I think "z_sin" was the name of a library function in libf77/libg2c).
So I don't worry about publishing my email addresses anymore. Any spammer that sends mail to one of them is likely to send it to at least a few of those 500 or so spamtrap addresses around the same time, and there are likely to be enough similarities in the mails that my MTA can easily detect all of them as likely spam and not accept them. (Similarities might be "obvious" -- I get a fair amount of SMTP injections, which my "special" SMTP server ultimately reject, that try to deliver a single message to several spamtraps as well as one or two legit addresses at once; suggestive of a zombie, when multiple SMTP connections each delivering to spamtraps come in from a particular IP address; or less obvious, as when the content is roughly similar, but includes apparently-randomized portions.)
I've come to believe (with less than 100% certainty) that the "solution" to the spam problem is not to focus so much on identifying its sources, blocking them, challenging them (e.g. in court), detecting spam via automated content analysis, and so on -- although those techniques obviously have some utility -- but, rather, to use the same environment that makes spamming cost-effective for spammers, except changed in certain ways (some subtle, some maybe more overt) so the same environment becomes much more hostile to spammers, just as my domain names are "hostile" in that they nicely accept entire emails from most spam sources and th
I agree — SPF is not a silver bullet, and using it is probably unwise, though publishing SPF records (other than just "?all") for those who insist on using it seems reasonable to me.
This is a particularly telling quote, because nowhere did I say that those who didn't want to participate would necessarily all be "those who want a system of private ownership of natural resources". Yet you define all non-participants as "thieves", apparently even if they merely want, but do not necessarily have, private property. (Was your wording intentional?) So they are thieves because they are outside your system and do not therefore share a stake in your property -- which is why I posed the problem in the first place.
If that's true, then the word "thief", as you use it, has little or no utility when it comes to defining desireable outcomes. A "thief" in your view would be either someone who believes in private property ownership under any system other than yours or does not wish (or is not able) to participate in your system, regardless of their views.
So I must dismiss any pertinence of the term "thief", which you insist on continually throwing around, as it has little or no value in constructing a system. Which leaves us with the question of how to handle the problem of non-participation in any system that purports to justify itself based on "equity", vis-a-vis the question of whether non-participants are, by virtue of the existence and predominance of that system, inherently disadvantaged either in relation to the system's nonexistence (difficult to assess) or when compared to those who do participate in the system (which becomes a matter of the system either being truly equitable or not).
In fact, if you look at even entirely voluntary systems controlling infinitely reproducible, and thus basically ephemeral resources, such as software, you'll see that it's often the case that people can and will disagree with a system that controls a thing even while agreeing with the basis (reason) for that system. For example, many people agree with the ideal of free software (GNU, GCC, Apache, etc.), but it happens, often enough to be worth pondering, that "turf wars" and even splits occur within the development and/or support communities (GCC versus EGCS comes to mind). And this is over software that is freely distributable, not over limited real property, where the stakes are presumably so much higher.
What you have done in your quote, however, is flat-out state that anyone who does not accept your particular system for equitable property distribution and thus wants to opt out as a participant is also someone who goes against your goals for such equity -- which might or might not be true -- and thus is a "thief".
Regardless of whether it's true (after all, there's no point in trying to divine the motivations of any "outsider", and certainly no fence you wish to construct will be able to do that), what your response illustrates is that you are, in fact, in favor of inequitable ownership of real property, at least in the case where the "owner" is a corporate entity of some sort, and you are in favor of fencing off that real property so only those who make up that corporation get to enjoy it, regardless of whether that fencing-off results in a larger-scale inequity. (Yes, I realize that you would further qualify your favoring such inequity only when the corporate owner implemented your system, but what's the utility of that, if you don't represent a nearly-unanimous view among all mankind?)
It's at that point that I wonder just how your system is different from what we have today, if you accept that any individual person is also legitimately considered a "corporate interest" insofar as he or she has an "identity" within the larger collective s
You seem to have misunderstood the thrust of my questions. I was not saying the present system is better or more desireable than your proposed system.
I was simply asking how your proposed system could, or would, actually work in practice, such that it accomplishes what you say it would.
Your answers failed to address most or all of the questions. For example, saying the citizens of planet earth would decide what is equitable or would vote in an equitable way utterly fails to address, to name just one concern, how that takes into account those citizens who would not agree with the majority decision regarding "equity".
There are many other practical problems with your proposal that perhaps you could address as well, if you had been willing and able to lay a foundation for how the system actually worked. (For example, if two people to whom land was previously "equitably" distributed privately chose to exchange some portion of the shared land for some other benefit they considered tangible but that wasn't "equitably distributed" by your proposed System, wouldn't that mean that real property itself was no longer "equitably distributed"? How would your system detect and correct this?)
But it was worth a try anyway. Note that, in the future, if you don't like being asked allegedly "loaded" questions about your proposed systems to correct some cosmic imbalance you perceive exists in the universe, you shouldn't post commentary that strongly suggests you have already formulated reasonable answers to them.
Also, you are probably aware that there are plenty of places on planet earth right now where people interested in "owning" (in a practical, if not legal, sense) some real property and living out their lives can go -- places where they would daily gather fruits and nuts, or perhaps hunt local game, for survival, though have little or no access to what some might call the fruits of modern civilization (which is substantially, if not entirely, based on notions of real-property ownership by individuals and corporations that you certain consider unethical).
Yet there is hardly any stampede of people towards such places. Indeed, from what I've read on the subject, people who try them out with the best of intentions usually end up fleeing them later.
This is among many reasons why I accept, despite reservations about "inequitability" and more-serious ones about the violence that seemingly is necessary to support it, our present property-ownership system. It allows individuals (and corporate entities, which I view as legal fictions vis-a-vis an individual human being's God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness) to cooperate and/or compete for whatever sorts of property they most value at any given time in their lives -- real, intellectual, monetary, equities (shares in for-profit corporations), and so on.
Like you, I've long considered ways to improve or replace the system with something better. But I have been unable to do so, because I can't come up with one that assures global equity of property distribution across an entire populace that satisfies everybody, from those who believe children are property of parents (that is, a child that is born is not suddenly given an equal "share" of land that is accordingly taken away from others in some piecemeal, perhaps rather destructive, fashion, but only shares in what the parents already "own" under a system as the parents see fit) to those who are zealous advocates of animal rights (who do not accept that any human or collection of humans has any more "rights" to a piece of land than any animal, from primates on "down" the Darwinian ladder, to the extent the advocate accepts th
Both of your solutions require "a system" of control -- either explicit ("democratic control of property") or implicit ("distributes an equitable amount...") -- which requires substantial input (definitions of "equitable", of "everyone", of "contract"), output (the control, including assignments with regard to which property is used how, when, and by whom), and internal beauracracy.
So, would these systems themselves own property? (But "property is theft", you say!) If not, where would such a system exist, how would it conduct its business, exert its influence (control and police property boundaries as required), etc.?
Who would make the decisions on behalf of the systems' inner workings -- who would decide who gets to vote on "democratic control" issues (children? fetuses? really smart chimpanzees?), for example, and how they vote? An "elite" of some sort? And who would elect and subsequently oversee those elite? Meanwhile, would those elite get special favors, such as particularly valuable property? If so, would that be "equitable" or "ethical"? If not, what would be the incentive for anyone to put themselves in such a position, if it was policed to a greater extent than the "common man", but yielded no extra benefits?
In fact, how would any such system balance the desires of person X to trade his property with person Y, given that X prefers Y's property even though X's property might actually be larger, because X's is in a desert and Y has oceanfront property in Boca Raton, FL? (Well, that pertains to your first system, which distributes property "equitably", even though you seem to believe "property is theft" -- so would everyone be a thief in that system?)
Or, taking the second system, what about people (or even animals) who would simply refuse, for whatever reason, to participate in the system you've proposed? Would they, or would they not, be "fenced off" from the property "claimed" by the collectivist system you propose? If fenced off, isn't that the same as the property that is "theft" in your view, except insofar as the "owner" is a faceless corporate amalgamation you call "a system of democratic control"? If not fenced off, how valuable would the collective's property be if anyone or anything outside the system could use, exploit, even plunder the property?
And when you say "these are the only ethical ways of dealing with the issue of scarcity in regards to real property", why do you believe any particular human being's definition of "ethics" should determine how an entire planet's land mass is distributed among the humans who populate it? And, why do you believe real property is "scarce"? If each and every person presently on this planet was given one whole acre of land, how big would that collective land mass be measured in terms with which we might be more familiar:
That is, which of the above is the smallest that still contains six to seven billion acres of land?
Finally, are you aware of any experiments that put your approaches into practice? How do they work, how well do they work (how inclusive, ethical, etc. are they in practice), and how long have they been working? Are they serving as examples for others to try out? Do they require violence to enforce rules? Is the property collectively owned more, or less, productive than that owned by capitalists?
I know there are a lot of questions here, but I think they naturally arise due to your proposal to replace each and every socioeconomic, political, and religious system on the planet with your idea(s).
Perhaps true -- but it will someday be replaced. (And I say this as the author of a Fortran compiler. ;-)
So, replaced by what kind of beast?
I view SMTP as designed in response to two fundamental "realities" circa the timeframe in which it was designed:
(The ARPANET/Internet of its day was composed mostly of academics and others who used it as a tool to do research, not to spread vermin, sell stuff, or circulate chain mail further.)
(In particular, aside from the postage issue, which doesn't always apply anyway, we are accustomed to dropping an item into a mailbox and expecting The System to either deliver it to its destination, or return, or "bounce", it back to us, assuming we've recorded the return address correctly. That makes sense, because we don't necessarily have another copy of the item to send if we can't be sure it was received, and The System was viewed as a single central authority that could be relied upon.)
Expectations are much different now. Most email sent is not desired by the recipient -- the vast majority is spam, scams, and vermin -- and people are accustomed to the "information-age" ability to quickly and reliably reproduce information, so they understand that a "lost" email isn't a problem so long as they have the original copy to retransmit and they are able to determine that it might indeed have been "lost".
Are you really sure no new system that takes into account modern "realities" would be able to fundamentally change the balance of power between email senders and recipients such that illegitimate bulk senders are, for a change, the ones left out in the cold, ultimately replacing SMTP?
(I'm not; I'm designing just such a system, initially for use by sysadmins trying to do stuff like configuring SMTP and SSL to work right. Something has to let them send emails when today, or tomorrow's, email system ain't working! ;-)
Why do you have to have pipelining turned off? Pipelining doesn't change the fact that a working TCP connection must be established, which requires handshaking underneath the hood (which verifies the client IP), and that there is an initial content-level handshake (server greeting followed by client EHLO and server's EHLO response) that must occur before the client may use pipelining, which means the client must see the server's EHLO response before sending more data (or that the server not notice or care if the client is "presumptuous", aka an "early talker"; if it does, it might assume the client is spamware). That greeting/EHLO/EHLO-response exchange requires that the server have the correct IP address of the client. In particular, a client may not use pipelinining until it sees that the server's EHLO response includes the keyword "PIPELINING", which means the server's EHLO response must actually reach the client, so it must have the correct IP address.
A protocol built on datagrams (such as DHCP) instead of TCP connections (like FTP, HTTP, and SMTP) would, however, not necessarily require the client to expose, or even have, an IP address that the server could reliably use. Is that what you were thinking of? If so, I think a good general solution is for any protocol, whose users might want to verify IP addresses on both ends, to allow the server to require a client to return a unique cookie at the content level (that is, augmenting whatever happens underneath the hood for, say, a TCP connection) in order to continue the conversation.
(I'm thinking about these issues because I am designing a new email system that could make good use of datagrams to do many email exchanges in a "lightweight" fashion. So if I'm wrong about this, I'd really like to know that sooner rather than later....)
Seems reasonable to me to say "agnosticism" isn't a religion; it isn't the belief in a deity, or in the nonexistence of a deity. It's the lack of acceptance of either belief, which presumably includes the unwillingness to subscribe to any system of beliefs that spring from either belief.
As far as religious proscriptions on murder: at least some belief systems (like JudeoChristian beliefs) have such proscriptions! (Whether individual atheists have them is irrelevant, since individual Christians have them as well, even if the sects to which they belong have similar proscriptions more, or less, strongly.)
Other than that, I see little to object to in your post. Of course atheists have been persecuted for their non-belief; human nature (not theist religion, else atheists wouldn't share in this tendency, but they do) is such that intolerance for the different beliefs of others manifests itself in a wide variety of nasty ways, as does envy (and other emotions) of those who hold similar beliefs!
Actually, it was.
I believe history, and the Church itself, are both quite clear on that; no, I don't think "they" would be to differ, though I am not a Catholic and don't speak for the Church; and "Christianity" no more purports to be an ideology than a brick purports to be a suitable material for building.
Take that up with the atheists who I've seen and heard frequently exercise self-congratulation that their beliefs make them superior (in some way I've yet to fully comprehend) to those who are religious.
And please explain to me why there's a constant stream of atheistic invective against organized religion, especially Christianity (though, oddly, not Islam, but then I don't have as much experience with forums in which Islamic views are strongly represented). After all, there's no reason for any atheist to give a fig that someone believes in one God, versus believing in one million deities, or none at all; and, even if there was such a reason, there's no atheistic directive to "preach the gospel", try to "convert" others, etc.
Yet, I get far more atheists "knocking on my door", insisting I "adopt" their religion, than I do Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons, and other "religious" types combined. (That takes into account the Internet, of course; why would any atheists even bother participating in a discussion on prayer, anyway? I don't participate in discussions of whether rosary beads actually do any good, to pick an example I know basically nothing about!)
I can -- and have -- go among the deeply religious of various faiths (whether in places of worship, in public places, or in a prison), be open and honest about my religious beliefs, and pretty much get, and certainly give, nothing but respect for others' beliefs.
But the nastiest, filthiest invective I experience, when it comes to insulting my religious beliefs (whether directed at me personally, or just ridiculing beliefs I recognize as my own, in general), pretty much comes 100% from atheists.
Does that not mean those atheists are basically acting as if they are a religion? Or does that just make them a bunch of jerks, in your view? (Maybe they're just a subculture of atheists that, to make a wild guess, is in, or freshly out, of college, after having been "indoctrinated" by left-wing professors and other kooks to attack Christianity as a means to undermine Republicans? Darby's sig, "Murder a Republican", is consistent with this speculation. But the utter lack of response by atheists to their "own kind" speaking improperly on their behalf, and with disrespect, to and about others, suggests that this subculture is, in practice if not precisely, representative of atheists in general. Is this guy misguided, in treating both atheism and Christianity as religions? Do atheists frequently gather together and promote, or "peer-pressure", each other to tolerate the religious beliefs of others, as do Jews, Christians, and Muslims, to name just a few religions with which I'm familiar?)
Also, keep in mind that one of the fundamental distinguishing characteristics of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, at the times and in the contexts where they began, were not that they believed in a God, but that they believed in one God.
Whereas, the cultures from which they largely sprang were "immersed" (and probably greatly stifled by) the belief in many gods, with many conflicting, confusing demands, which (of cour
Or, as a friendly neighbor put it when, in a polite dinner conversation, I mentioned that I finally felt I had begun to grasp what the Bible actually said, "Do I have to worry about your coming to my house with a gun and killing me?"
The fact that he's Jewish isn't the point: it's that, in the minds of many, it is religion (as in those who believe in God, as you yourself define it) that is the problem.
And there is no substantial distinction between going from "Jews are the problem with our society" to the Holocaust, and "Religion is the problem with our society" and a similar sort of result -- as history has already shown.
But not as atheists, and I don't know where you could possibly get the idea I'm "just so obsessed with whether or not someone affirms [my] particular metaphysics", as you put it.It's readily apparent, to anyone watching such discussions, that, regardless of how you depict atheists, there is a substantial community of them who spend inordinate amounts of time and energy incessantly criticizing Believers, especially Christians. That, despite having no "core beliefs" that would drive them to do so, other than their (very strong) belief that there is no God, and their communal (and IMO rather smug) sense that the religious are idiots and/or nuts who must somehow be kept in their place, or removed to another.
In doing so, these people expose themselves as a community of just the sort you deny exists, or can exist. Regardless of whether they're a minority of those who are truly "atheists", they exert a disproportionate amount of control over the collective sense of what atheism is, and how atheists should behave.
In that sense, they're hardly any different from that minority of atheists that managed to exterminate tens of millions of innocent lives -- or that minority of Christians that managed to sanction the Inquisition, and similar horrors.
So, I don't care whether someone affirms (or denies) my particular metaphysics at all.
But when atheists walk, talk, and act like the radically religious they claim to despise, it becomes pretty silly to talk about atheism as if it is not, in practice, a religion like any other...
In any case, atheists would do well (and be more intellectually honest) to stop using labels like "religion" in discussions such as this, and instead be more specific about exactly which behaviors they are criticizing, promoting, etc.
In that sense, saying "Christians were responsible for the Inquisition" is similar to saying "Atheists were responsible for the atrocities of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot". They each were, and weren't, in similar ways, though the numbers (thousands versus tens of millions of victims) certainly differ.
Denying not only that God exists (or that gods exist), but also that those who believe otherwise are at best misguided, at worst evil (see Darby's earlier post for an example of how atheistic thinking ends up going down that road), seems about as "common" as necessary for the purpose(s) at hand. Yeah, that certainly can't be said about Christians now, can it?But your observations strike me as essentially correct. They pertain to advantages and disadvantages of a coherent philosophy: atheists (in the pure sense, not in the "hijacked" or "hijacking" sense) don't have to worry about being in violent disagreement with each other, because what would they disagree about? On the other hand, they have little incentive to agree on anything and, in particular, to create anything (especially anything requiring substantial self-sacrifice, perhaps including dependant life, like children) as an outgrowth, demonstration, celebration, or symbol, of that agreement.
So we end up with all the infighting (and outfighting!) surrounding Christianity, but that goes hand-in-hand with building spectacular (and often protective) churches (which the Bible, especially Jesus Christ, does not really direct the religious to do!), forming productive and reproductive societies, feeding the hungry, giving to the poor, and so on (those in response to religious, that is, Biblical, directives, though politically-active atheists prefer to focus their attentions on the Pledge of Allegiance and "In God We Trust" rather than weightier matters, such as government endorsement of marriage as an institution, the welfare state, Social Security, and so on, all of which have purely religious origins -- and which politically-active Christians conveniently ignore when they claim that our society is "going downhill", as if the nearly-worldwide, wholesale adoption of ideas that used to be ridiculed as "Christian" is unacceptable when not labeled as such!).
In short, it seems our universe is designed to reward affirmation, rather than denial, as a precursor to reproduction.
What is clear is that you've decided to make your attacks personal, and impute to me beliefs and stances that I do not hold and/or have not taken.
That's rather strange, since there are clear indications that you do in fact hold to "core beliefs" that are basically the same as mine, including the Golden Rule, which is a fundamentally religious belief.
It's also self-defeating, since you are attacking someone who believes so strongly in some of the same "core beliefs" you yourself hold, that he has withdrawn from his two (and only) life-long memberships in Christian churches (a branch as well as its worldwide church) specifically because of the conflicts -- between "religion" and the actual scriptural texts -- those core beliefs came to represent. (But I still attend and support the truly Christian aspects of those same churches.)
In the Old Testament, a choice is given to the people: between blessing and Life, or cursing and Death. I have consciously chosen to stick with blessing and Life, because, among other things, it is simply more productive to focus on creating and inspiring the few with whom I come into contact, than to feel I must curse, and wish for or otherwise seek the death of, any person, institution, or ideology that I feel contradicts mine.
And it is now clear to me that this choice, albeit presented as a "one-time thing", or at least a "one-people thing", is in fact the choice each and every person must make, as the Information Age presses upon all of us, presenting us with as full a world-wide panoply of good and evil, blessing and cursing, life and death, as any of us can possibly cope with.
So, one cannot expect to "straddle" that choice in any productive way, at least, not for long. The cause for cursing will always be present here on earth; the "need" too great, the demands (especially of those so skilled at cursing) too large, to allow for a full and proper pursuit of the path of blessing.
The Bible is a very compelling account of the realities of this choice, and what happens to those who choose one, the other, or both. In that light, I'm much more "impressed" with its wisdom than I ever was expected to be as a child or even a young adult -- but I suppose that's to be expected once one decides to accept or reject a text for oneself, rather than based on the direction or guidance of others.
Based on your conduct here, it seems you've chosen the path of cursing, substantially if not entirely. That does not mean you "deserve" to die, or anything like that; it does mean you've chosen to not bless and multiply ideals that contain, in and of themselves, that which is needed to further bless and multiply.
The good news is, you've done and said nothing worse than many others who've been on the same path, and probably no longer than anyone else -- others who've suddenly "seen the light" and switched to blessing and life -- so you can make that decision as well (depending on which parts of the Bible you believe, and how you interpret them).
(In particular, you'll probably have an easier time finding Christians who are willing to admit that their religion was hijacked for use in atrocities like the Inqusition than Atheists who admit that their ideology was hijacked for use by Stalin, Pol Pot, etc.)
In any case, your points about Christianity are essentially correct, but I think I should make clear, and believe you are on the same track, that what we are really talking about is not so much that "Christianity" or "atheism" are evil (or not) ideologies, rather, the extent to which a given ideology, or way of life, helps or retards moral and spiritual growth among its adherents, as well as others with whom they come into contact.
For me, the question is "complicated" (that is, not as trivially answered as by someone like Darby) because the denial of false gods -- including the "God" of so many religious sects, including those describing themselves as Christian -- is a) sometimes necessary to free the enslaved and b) occasionally assisted by atheists.
Putting aside mystical issues (such as whether God exists) and historical ones (such as whether Jesus existed), the issue really boils down to whether a given ideology offers a sustainable basis for human civilization.
As "attractive" (due at least to its simplicity) as Atheism is, there's little evidence it provides such a basis, but it does, in my view, serve a useful role as a sort of offshoot of the scientific method, which clearly has offered such a basis.
Nonsense. It is now quite clear that you indeed have not bothered to understand the Bible.
People with your worldview, especially your disdain for the Bible and anybody who believes in its teachings, have been murdering the "religious" for millenia.
Agreed. And your ideology appears to be as absolute as anyone else's, based on your rhetoric here.
In any case, if the specific details don't matter, why are you singling out the Bible? Why don't you go on a similar rant about the Koran, and Muhammed, and Islam? Or are we to simply assume you mean to include Islam among the religions you reject, along with the intelligence and/or sincerity of its adherents?
Really? You honestly believe any Pope -- never mind the one installed at the time of Pol Pot -- was just as murderous (or, hey, within an order of magnitude) as Pol Pot?
Or, perhaps they possess a quality you've never even considered: humility.
Again, I find it amazing that you actually appear to believe that you've completely internalized a huge, thousands-year-old text to the point that you can completely dismiss its practicality and handwave its well-documented status (as the most-read book in history) and effects (the basis for the most successful civilizations in history), as well as anyone who claims to have read it but admitted they don't fully understand it.
Again, relevance? The key points, that there are differing views of What Happened, which are entirely obvious to anyone reading the Bible and expecting literal, logical consistency. It doesn't really matter, then, just how inconsistent reports and/or explanations came to be found in the Bible; to the reader, the fact is, they are there, and unabashedly so.
Communism is religion, period. So is all science. So are your claims. You have no basis to claim that the Bible is inconsistent other than the religious belief that there even exists concepts like "consistency" or "coherency" in the first place.
You might be describing Agnosticism, but not Atheism. Atheism denies
Seems to me that if the Bible did as you claimed, governments would require it to be read and understood by their own people -- especially the more tyrannical, totalitarian types.
Instead, such governments demand readership and/or worship of "The Communist Manifesto" and the like.
If you don't want your "knowledge" questioned, you might keep your opinions to yourself, then?But it is a bug, and I agree it (and similar bugs) should be fixed in an official release of qmail (not just a patch, which is what netqmail is).
Note that I wrote the web page, to which I link above and to which the GP linked, about ten months ago, and it has been widely read and linked to. But nobody has yet seen fit to hire me (or even request of me as a volunteer!) to fix the pertinent bugs, nor have I bothered to do so myself!
I think that's consistent with your impression of qmail, security-wise: people who really look at the big picture realize that complaining about qmail's "vulnerabilites" is, at best, a waste of breath; nobody wants to also waste money on trying to "solve" non-problems.
By your own "logic" (which is breathtakingly self-satisfied, besides being wrong), then, logic, mathematics, and physics, which are claimed to be omnipresent and/or represent (or describe) omniscience, at least in any meaningful sense, are either impossible, or are falsely invoked by those who so advocate them.
And, since mathematics, for example, cannot be omnipresent, nor omniscient, nor omnipotent, there necessarily exist places and times where 2 + 2 != 4.
As you've also ruled out the omnipresence (etc.) of logic, your own logic is not only potentially faulty (even if not demonstrably so by humanity), all of science is nothing more than faith, since it is entirely dependent on logic for it to be at all distinguishable from religion in the first place.
Further, since only logic tells us that, there not being any such thing as God, there is therefore no such thing as God, and logic is not omnipresent nor omniscient, atheism is false, since it denies the existence of something that might, in fact, exist, and it does so based solely on logic (which can be false at any point in space or time, or at all points) and belief (that God doesn't exist), the latter being, in and of itself, not fundamentally any different from the belief that God does exist, except, at least, the religious needn't concern themselves with science (and, indeed, mankind has flourished for millenia with little or no apprehension of science, while distinguishing itself from all other species by having spirituality and religion).
So, congratulations! You've not only defined away the possible existence of God (or at least certain forms of Him, as described by his own Creation), you've defined away science, logic, and atheism!
Anyway, all the above generalizations are false, but true enough for common specific situations that programmers interested in performance should take them into account.
Many compilers do their most, best optimizations at the "basic block" level, and might (or might not) treat any GOTO (conditional or unconditional) as "ending" a basic block, thus disabling optimizations that might otherwise "work" across them, had "more elegant" code been used instead.
(I've worked on the internals of such compilers. Especially in the Fortran world, where ancient but important benchmarks have already been "hand-optimized" to use lots of GOTOs, it has been tempting to include a "code lifting" pass to the optimizer that replaces GOTO's with "more elegant" code for the subsequent optimization phases, including breaking things up into basic blocks, to do a better job on.)
Also, whether a GOTO is explicit or implicit might or might not affect how a compiler views it.
In C, the "goto" keyword is 100% explicit, as is "longjmp()". "if", "while", "return", "switch" with 'natural' "break"'s at the end of each "case" are all nearly 100% implicit. "continue" and "break" in 'unusual' places are examples of grey-areas that compilers might or might not treat just like explicit "goto"'s in terms of optimization.
CPUs are another matter. Conditional branches do tend to be bad juju for most modern CPUs (RISC and CISC built in the past 20 years), but sometimes unconditional branches also can introduce problems compared to code that simply "flows through" using repeated conditional tests but not conditional GOTOs (JMPs or branches or whatever).
Hence the addition of instructions like CMOV (Conditional MOVe) to RISC sets like SPARC (working from memory here, apologies if I've gotten technical details wrong).
Point being that a decent optimizing compiler these days should not assume GOTO means "stop optimizing", and should not blindly generate JMP/Branch instructions just to avoid extra compares or moves, or even fetches from memory, unless it is sure the savings outweighs the costs (say, the CPU really won't hiccup, or it saves an extra Icache line crossing, or something like that).