Hi. I'm a gecko, not to be confused with Geiko, who can save you 15% or more on car insurance. This sick bastard has been chasing me all week telling me he wants to turn my feet into glue. I keep trying to tell him that the glue is made out of Geico feet, but he just won't believe me. Will you please STOP FOLLOWING ME!!?!
[He steps into a loop of rope, followed by the screen going black and showing a Geico logo as we hear the sound of a gecko going airborne.]
Yup. That's what my Mini is used for. Makes the perfect personal server. They don't take up much space, can easily connect into your existing KVM, are inexpensive, and still provide enough horsepower for most moderate-use server purposes.
SSH uses SSL libraries for crypto, but not in the same way that a traditional SSL-secured services do, so I don't consider it an SSL-based service. They do serve the same purpose, though, and with foresight (memorizing the SSH key fingerprints, for example) have equivalent levels of security. With SSH, the key process is very much ad hoc when compared with traditional SSL-secured services that use certs signed by a signing agency.
Certainly you'd do just as well with SSH as with other SSL-derived services assuming you've ssh'ed to that machine at least once with your laptop while in a known, trusted DNS environment. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Of course, if you forget to connect from a trusted network first, there's a world of difference between SSH and a signed-cert-based SSL protocol.
Agreed. Those numbers are almost certainly very, very wrong. First, AFAIK, it is a mail-in battery replacement program. That means it is being done by somebody in a repair facility somewhere, not by a store employee, so the whole lost sale thing is complete crap.... Second, the GP didn't take real-world shipping costs into account. I don't know what type of shipping is used, but with laptop repairs, it was always three-day select at minimum, sometimes second day or next day. Even if it is ground, though, Apple is probably eating a truckload of shipping costs. They charge a $6.95 shipping fee for this repair. By my estimate, that's only about 2/3rds what I'd expect the one-way UPS ground cost to be. Round trip next-day would be over $100, second day would be almost $50, and three-day would be almost $40. While Apple probably gets special pricing on shipping, there's only so much cheaper it could get before FedEx or UPS would lose money on the deal, which they obviously wouldn't do....
There's only one solution that guarantees that nobody will rifle through your data: don't bring it with you through the border crossing. That's what servers are for... and SSL, or at least SSH/SCP/SFTP.
The "no electronics during takeoff" has two purposes: safety and communication.
Safety:
Yes, as you mention, hearing announcements is part of that, but it's more than that. In the event of something going wrong, it is most likely to occur during takeoff or landing. If something goes wrong, you can have sudden altitude changes, sudden radical changes in direction/tilt, etc. It is better for everyone if you don't have stuff flying around the cabin.
Communication:
If memory serves, the craft's computers use a low frequency, low power AM signal (I forget the frequency) for receiving ground-based transmissions that give the plane's weight during taxi, wind speed and direction info, etc. That communication is susceptible to interference. While AFAIK it is unlikely that a failure would actually cause a crash, a communication failure would show up as a warning light that would cause the pilot to abort takeoff (if possible), I believe, thus delaying everyone.
What I don't get is how the videodisc instant replay stuff they used back in the 1970s or early 80s didn't completely kill this patent through prior art. It's not like this is the first time a ring buffer of recordable video media has been used to pause a live video signal and play it back (optionally in slow motion, even). The networks have been doing this literally for decades. The only thing novel about this patent is that the ring buffer is stored digitally and compressed on the spinning platters (and thus it is practical for them to keep 30 minutes of ring buffer instead of 30 seconds).
If they weren't able to challenge it successfully, either their lawyers are inept or the judge is clueless or both. This patent has no more merit than the "on the internet" patents. In fact, it is literally a "do something that has been done for years, but with a computer" patent. How people can get patents on something like that is beyond me. It is a new use of an existing technology---something patents are not supposed to cover. I'm stunned that any competent judge ruled in TiVo's favor, frankly. I'm particularly disappointed that the Supreme Court denied certiorari. This is a pretty clear-cut case of patent abuse, IMHO....
...you're #199. If the computer provides that much advantage when combined with a single person, it stands to reason that it would also provide a huge advantage when two people read the charts. Unfortunately, knowing our medical system in the U.S., they'll probably just use this as an excuse to pay only one doctor to read the chart....
What I hope comes out of it are the following findings:
Customers have a fundamental right to unlocked phones except during a contractual subsidy period.
Telcos are required to provide unlock codes at the end of the subsidy period, with no exceptions. (It is then incumbent upon them to require the hardware manufacturers to provide those codes as part of their contractual agreements.)
I have mixed opinions on the other issues being argued, but my opinion on the unlocking thing is that AT&T needs to be smacked down hard.
A good start would be AIM/Jabber/* video conferencing protocols using encryption and open source. In those protocols, the server helps you figure out the IP of the person you want to talk to, but otherwise doesn't see the messages (except in AIM for text messages when the user is offline).
Who cares. Unless it knows where the packets are going or what is in them, all that it knows is that you are using Tor for something. Period.
At best, this shows why it is important to get people to use onion routing more than occasionally so that we don't get asshat politicians thinking that discovering somebody using Tor is grounds for suspicion and a physical search and seizure just to find out what law they are presumably breaking....:-)
The whole point of onion routing is that unless a large percentage of nodes are compromised, it is impossible to connect one end of the communication with the other, and it is impossible to connect any particular data payload with its sender. Tor is not the strongest of the onion routers, but it is likely good enough to thwart practical attacks.
All it knows is that you sent some data somewhere. That's the whole point of Tor. No router until the final router can see either the contents of the packet or its destination, and by the time it gets to the final hop, that final router has no idea who the sender was; it only knows which router sent the packet to it, which in turn knows which router sent the packet to it, etc.
Worse, that 10 minutes applies to legitimate users posting anonymously with the "Post anonymously" checkbox, which it shouldn't. If a logged in user is posting anon, it is probably because the subject is too sensitive for that person to post publicly (e.g. relating to that person's employer, etc.). Most of the crapflood folks are likely not logged in.
I think the problem here is that someday you might want to send anonymous mail of a religious or political nature and most would agree that there is merit in that not being illegal.
No, we wouldn't. There is no merit to that whatsoever. There are plenty of ways of communicating religious or political messages that do not require forging email headers. First, there are anonymous email accounts that do not forge anything. Second, there are anonymous blogging services. Third, there are anonymous web hosting providers. The techniques that these anti-spam laws use have no valid use except to send out mail with no way to communicate back to the original sender whatsoever, making it nearly useless for legitimate religious or political messaging purposes.
I wish that public key signing of e-mail on a massive system was possible and inexpensive (or free!) and massively adopted so that I could filter out unsigned e-mail.
Yup. I agree. However, if we get to the point where we have to start signing things to prevent spam, legitimate anonymous email will become a lot harder, and thus laws like this one actually protect legitimate anonymous speech by making it harder for people to abuse the email system in a way that causes people to overreact and block all anonymous speech. The negative consequences of spam on free speech are far, far greater than the negative effects of this law, so if this law successfully reduces spam, it has a positive impact on free speech, not a negative one.
I would also add that free speech---even free political speech---is not absolute. The Supreme Court has long held that time, place, and manner restrictions on speech are perfectly allowable. Email is a manner of speech. It is, therefore, completely reasonable to put limits on speech sent via email, so long as the restriction is reasonably narrow in scope, which these regulations are, IMHO. The court striking this down is completely unreasonable, and I would strongly encourage Virginia to ask the SCOTUS to grant certiorari on this one.
If they're able to get it into a top secret facility, you're already screwed. More to the point, if a "bad guy" spook's method depends on the "good guy" spooks having to throw it away after it stops working, then they need to get better hardware engineers. After all, adding an EDGE cellular chip into a device like that is all of... what... three or four bucks? Far cheaper than figuring out a way to make the device fail after a couple of months so the user will throw it away.
The bottom line is that if your IT people can tell which devices can store data and which devices can't, these regulations don't make sense. If they can't tell the difference, then you've already hopelessly lost the battle of protecting the security of your data, and can safely assume that anybody who wants the data already has it. Either way, these regulations don't do any good. They're security theater all over again.
This type of "blanket" policy that makes no exceptions is actually pretty smart, as it is the exceptions that will come back and bite you in the butt.
No, a smart policy would prevent precisely what they are trying to prevent. A smart policy would say that any device that is capable of permanent retention of data, once contaminated, cannot be resold. That means hard drives, flash cards, and any camera that contains flash memory if such photos were ever stored in the built-in flash memory at any time.
Preventing resale of devices that cannot retain data is idiotic. It only makes sense under the assumption that the people working for your IT department are too inept to know the difference.
There will always be problems of people screwing up and selling things that they shouldn't, but at least by setting sane policies, you reduce the risk of such things being sold due to people desperate for a bigger department budget by reducing the list of things that can't be sold but don't really matter.
Yup. What did we learn, boys and girls? (Okay, I know I'm being optimistic on that last part.) If you find yourself with evidence related to a terrorism investigation because an inept government official sold it on eBay, don't go to the police. Send it to the media. Anonymously.
Making a grocery store more energy conscious is a great idea. I was just grumbling yesterday while walking through a grocery that they should segregate the fresh produce and put doors on all those open meat/cheese/dairy cabinets and horizontal freezers so that the whole store wouldn't be 50 degrees inside.... I wouldn't be surprised if you could cut energy use by an order of magnitude just by fixing all the really stupid, obvious, and huge energy pigs in your typical grocery store... not to mention that your customers would be much happier at not having to wear a heavy coat when they go out food shopping in the middle of the summer....
Actually, all the apps you list are fairly typical, largely unoptimized apps. Most apps (with the exception of apps with lots of hand-rolled assembler code) get about a 5% performance boost from going x86-64 (at least on Core 2 CPUs). Frankly, I'd be amazed if you didn't see at least a slight speed benefit from 64-bit with those apps. Whether it was enough for you to actually notice it or not is another question. I've never benchmarked 32-bit versus 64-bit on an Atom, so I can only speculate.
As I said, though, I would expect the win to be greater because the CPU can't do nearly as much lookahead in prefetching data into registers, so having more registers can allow the code to be optimized for the Atom with a larger prefetching window than would be possible in the remarkably limited register set of the i386 architecture. Of course, the amount of boost you would get will likely depend in large part on whether you compile your OS (or at least your apps) with optimization settings appropriate for the Atom.
My point was to disagree with your statement that Netbooks had no purpose. They do---the screen size on airplanes, specifically. The rest of my post wasn't in any way related to the X40, but was addressing the original article question, which asked what I would put in a netbook type of device if I were designing one for myself.
Regarding 64-bit, many apps show a significant performance advantage when compiled for x86_64 over x86 due to the extra registers available. In a processor with no instruction reordering, register renaming, or speculative execution, I would expect that performance win to be significantly greater.
Also, Windows Server 7 is expected to be solely available for 64-bit architectures, though the client version (Windows 7) is expected to be available for both 32-bit and 64-bit machines. Whether that is still true by the time it ships or not likely depends on how many years it takes them to get it out the door. In any case, I would be very surprised if Microsoft continues to maintain all that legacy 32-bit CPU support much past Windows 7. Just my gut feeling.
The Thinkpad in question should be only about half an inch shorter when opened, assuming the hinge design doesn't eat any of that difference.
But to answer your questions, my goal in a Netbook is to have the capability to do the sorts of things I need to do when I get somewhere. That means being able to power an external portable drive for when the handful of GB of flash storage won't cut it (which is pretty much always). It would be a bit nuts to carry a smaller, lighter Netbook to use on the plane if I'm just going to have to haul around a second laptop for when I get where I'm going to actually be able to do anything useful.
Regarding the 2 GB of RAM, you really don't want to page to a flash drive, so you really need enough RAM to keep paging to an absolute minimum or you are wearing out your hardware. Also, when a bare-bones boot of Mac OS X takes about half a gig by itself (600 megs right now with one Safari window and one Terminal window open), a gig is an absolute minimum even if you aren't worried about paging traffic wearing out your flash drive.... 2 GB seems like a reasonable compromise. My current laptop has 3 GB.
Regarding 64-bit Atom, no, I'm not smoking crack. The desktop Atom variants support x86-64. IMHO, designing a new computer with a 32-bit CPU is like designing a car that required leaded gasoline after they announced that they were phasing it out....
Regarding ExpressCard, it doesn't seem that extreme to me. It's not like we're talking about a huge chunk of board real estate---you are likely to have a PCI Express chipset anyway, so it's pretty much a trivial amount of silicon plus a connector---and with the space you gain from ditching the optical drive, I think it's a perfectly reasonable addition that doesn't add much to the cost.
Which brings me to a better faith-related question:
In light of the complex moral issues we face every day, which do you think is more Christian---nay, more Christ-like---legislating one's own moral values, thus forcing others to conform to them, or allowing others to choose for themselves to believe in and obey that moral code? Put another way, do you believe that moral acts performed only because one is compelled to perform them represent a true path to salvation, or do you believe that it only really counts if a person actively chooses to do good of their own free will?
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Hi. I'm a gecko, not to be confused with Geiko, who can save you 15% or more on car insurance. This sick bastard has been chasing me all week telling me he wants to turn my feet into glue. I keep trying to tell him that the glue is made out of Geico feet, but he just won't believe me. Will you please STOP FOLLOWING ME!!?!
[He steps into a loop of rope, followed by the screen going black and showing a Geico logo as we hear the sound of a gecko going airborne.]
Yup. That's what my Mini is used for. Makes the perfect personal server. They don't take up much space, can easily connect into your existing KVM, are inexpensive, and still provide enough horsepower for most moderate-use server purposes.
SSH uses SSL libraries for crypto, but not in the same way that a traditional SSL-secured services do, so I don't consider it an SSL-based service. They do serve the same purpose, though, and with foresight (memorizing the SSH key fingerprints, for example) have equivalent levels of security. With SSH, the key process is very much ad hoc when compared with traditional SSL-secured services that use certs signed by a signing agency.
Certainly you'd do just as well with SSH as with other SSL-derived services assuming you've ssh'ed to that machine at least once with your laptop while in a known, trusted DNS environment. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. Of course, if you forget to connect from a trusted network first, there's a world of difference between SSH and a signed-cert-based SSL protocol.
Agreed. Those numbers are almost certainly very, very wrong. First, AFAIK, it is a mail-in battery replacement program. That means it is being done by somebody in a repair facility somewhere, not by a store employee, so the whole lost sale thing is complete crap.... Second, the GP didn't take real-world shipping costs into account. I don't know what type of shipping is used, but with laptop repairs, it was always three-day select at minimum, sometimes second day or next day. Even if it is ground, though, Apple is probably eating a truckload of shipping costs. They charge a $6.95 shipping fee for this repair. By my estimate, that's only about 2/3rds what I'd expect the one-way UPS ground cost to be. Round trip next-day would be over $100, second day would be almost $50, and three-day would be almost $40. While Apple probably gets special pricing on shipping, there's only so much cheaper it could get before FedEx or UPS would lose money on the deal, which they obviously wouldn't do....
There's only one solution that guarantees that nobody will rifle through your data: don't bring it with you through the border crossing. That's what servers are for... and SSL, or at least SSH/SCP/SFTP.
The "no electronics during takeoff" has two purposes: safety and communication.
Safety:
Yes, as you mention, hearing announcements is part of that, but it's more than that. In the event of something going wrong, it is most likely to occur during takeoff or landing. If something goes wrong, you can have sudden altitude changes, sudden radical changes in direction/tilt, etc. It is better for everyone if you don't have stuff flying around the cabin.
Communication:
If memory serves, the craft's computers use a low frequency, low power AM signal (I forget the frequency) for receiving ground-based transmissions that give the plane's weight during taxi, wind speed and direction info, etc. That communication is susceptible to interference. While AFAIK it is unlikely that a failure would actually cause a crash, a communication failure would show up as a warning light that would cause the pilot to abort takeoff (if possible), I believe, thus delaying everyone.
What I don't get is how the videodisc instant replay stuff they used back in the 1970s or early 80s didn't completely kill this patent through prior art. It's not like this is the first time a ring buffer of recordable video media has been used to pause a live video signal and play it back (optionally in slow motion, even). The networks have been doing this literally for decades. The only thing novel about this patent is that the ring buffer is stored digitally and compressed on the spinning platters (and thus it is practical for them to keep 30 minutes of ring buffer instead of 30 seconds).
If they weren't able to challenge it successfully, either their lawyers are inept or the judge is clueless or both. This patent has no more merit than the "on the internet" patents. In fact, it is literally a "do something that has been done for years, but with a computer" patent. How people can get patents on something like that is beyond me. It is a new use of an existing technology---something patents are not supposed to cover. I'm stunned that any competent judge ruled in TiVo's favor, frankly. I'm particularly disappointed that the Supreme Court denied certiorari. This is a pretty clear-cut case of patent abuse, IMHO....
...you're #199. If the computer provides that much advantage when combined with a single person, it stands to reason that it would also provide a huge advantage when two people read the charts. Unfortunately, knowing our medical system in the U.S., they'll probably just use this as an excuse to pay only one doctor to read the chart....
What I hope comes out of it are the following findings:
I have mixed opinions on the other issues being argued, but my opinion on the unlocking thing is that AT&T needs to be smacked down hard.
A good start would be AIM/Jabber/* video conferencing protocols using encryption and open source. In those protocols, the server helps you figure out the IP of the person you want to talk to, but otherwise doesn't see the messages (except in AIM for text messages when the user is offline).
Who cares. Unless it knows where the packets are going or what is in them, all that it knows is that you are using Tor for something. Period.
At best, this shows why it is important to get people to use onion routing more than occasionally so that we don't get asshat politicians thinking that discovering somebody using Tor is grounds for suspicion and a physical search and seizure just to find out what law they are presumably breaking.... :-)
The whole point of onion routing is that unless a large percentage of nodes are compromised, it is impossible to connect one end of the communication with the other, and it is impossible to connect any particular data payload with its sender. Tor is not the strongest of the onion routers, but it is likely good enough to thwart practical attacks.
All it knows is that you sent some data somewhere. That's the whole point of Tor. No router until the final router can see either the contents of the packet or its destination, and by the time it gets to the final hop, that final router has no idea who the sender was; it only knows which router sent the packet to it, which in turn knows which router sent the packet to it, etc.
That's what Tor is for.
Ah. I did misunderstand the intent. Thanks. Sorry if I came across as grumpy. :-)
Worse, that 10 minutes applies to legitimate users posting anonymously with the "Post anonymously" checkbox, which it shouldn't. If a logged in user is posting anon, it is probably because the subject is too sensitive for that person to post publicly (e.g. relating to that person's employer, etc.). Most of the crapflood folks are likely not logged in.
No, we wouldn't. There is no merit to that whatsoever. There are plenty of ways of communicating religious or political messages that do not require forging email headers. First, there are anonymous email accounts that do not forge anything. Second, there are anonymous blogging services. Third, there are anonymous web hosting providers. The techniques that these anti-spam laws use have no valid use except to send out mail with no way to communicate back to the original sender whatsoever, making it nearly useless for legitimate religious or political messaging purposes.
Yup. I agree. However, if we get to the point where we have to start signing things to prevent spam, legitimate anonymous email will become a lot harder, and thus laws like this one actually protect legitimate anonymous speech by making it harder for people to abuse the email system in a way that causes people to overreact and block all anonymous speech. The negative consequences of spam on free speech are far, far greater than the negative effects of this law, so if this law successfully reduces spam, it has a positive impact on free speech, not a negative one.
I would also add that free speech---even free political speech---is not absolute. The Supreme Court has long held that time, place, and manner restrictions on speech are perfectly allowable. Email is a manner of speech. It is, therefore, completely reasonable to put limits on speech sent via email, so long as the restriction is reasonably narrow in scope, which these regulations are, IMHO. The court striking this down is completely unreasonable, and I would strongly encourage Virginia to ask the SCOTUS to grant certiorari on this one.
Always fear those with glowing hearts. They might still be radioactive.
If they're able to get it into a top secret facility, you're already screwed. More to the point, if a "bad guy" spook's method depends on the "good guy" spooks having to throw it away after it stops working, then they need to get better hardware engineers. After all, adding an EDGE cellular chip into a device like that is all of... what... three or four bucks? Far cheaper than figuring out a way to make the device fail after a couple of months so the user will throw it away.
The bottom line is that if your IT people can tell which devices can store data and which devices can't, these regulations don't make sense. If they can't tell the difference, then you've already hopelessly lost the battle of protecting the security of your data, and can safely assume that anybody who wants the data already has it. Either way, these regulations don't do any good. They're security theater all over again.
No, a smart policy would prevent precisely what they are trying to prevent. A smart policy would say that any device that is capable of permanent retention of data, once contaminated, cannot be resold. That means hard drives, flash cards, and any camera that contains flash memory if such photos were ever stored in the built-in flash memory at any time.
Preventing resale of devices that cannot retain data is idiotic. It only makes sense under the assumption that the people working for your IT department are too inept to know the difference.
There will always be problems of people screwing up and selling things that they shouldn't, but at least by setting sane policies, you reduce the risk of such things being sold due to people desperate for a bigger department budget by reducing the list of things that can't be sold but don't really matter.
Yup. What did we learn, boys and girls? (Okay, I know I'm being optimistic on that last part.) If you find yourself with evidence related to a terrorism investigation because an inept government official sold it on eBay, don't go to the police. Send it to the media. Anonymously.
Making a grocery store more energy conscious is a great idea. I was just grumbling yesterday while walking through a grocery that they should segregate the fresh produce and put doors on all those open meat/cheese/dairy cabinets and horizontal freezers so that the whole store wouldn't be 50 degrees inside.... I wouldn't be surprised if you could cut energy use by an order of magnitude just by fixing all the really stupid, obvious, and huge energy pigs in your typical grocery store... not to mention that your customers would be much happier at not having to wear a heavy coat when they go out food shopping in the middle of the summer....
Actually, all the apps you list are fairly typical, largely unoptimized apps. Most apps (with the exception of apps with lots of hand-rolled assembler code) get about a 5% performance boost from going x86-64 (at least on Core 2 CPUs). Frankly, I'd be amazed if you didn't see at least a slight speed benefit from 64-bit with those apps. Whether it was enough for you to actually notice it or not is another question. I've never benchmarked 32-bit versus 64-bit on an Atom, so I can only speculate.
As I said, though, I would expect the win to be greater because the CPU can't do nearly as much lookahead in prefetching data into registers, so having more registers can allow the code to be optimized for the Atom with a larger prefetching window than would be possible in the remarkably limited register set of the i386 architecture. Of course, the amount of boost you would get will likely depend in large part on whether you compile your OS (or at least your apps) with optimization settings appropriate for the Atom.
My point was to disagree with your statement that Netbooks had no purpose. They do---the screen size on airplanes, specifically. The rest of my post wasn't in any way related to the X40, but was addressing the original article question, which asked what I would put in a netbook type of device if I were designing one for myself.
Regarding 64-bit, many apps show a significant performance advantage when compiled for x86_64 over x86 due to the extra registers available. In a processor with no instruction reordering, register renaming, or speculative execution, I would expect that performance win to be significantly greater.
Also, Windows Server 7 is expected to be solely available for 64-bit architectures, though the client version (Windows 7) is expected to be available for both 32-bit and 64-bit machines. Whether that is still true by the time it ships or not likely depends on how many years it takes them to get it out the door. In any case, I would be very surprised if Microsoft continues to maintain all that legacy 32-bit CPU support much past Windows 7. Just my gut feeling.
The Thinkpad in question should be only about half an inch shorter when opened, assuming the hinge design doesn't eat any of that difference.
But to answer your questions, my goal in a Netbook is to have the capability to do the sorts of things I need to do when I get somewhere. That means being able to power an external portable drive for when the handful of GB of flash storage won't cut it (which is pretty much always). It would be a bit nuts to carry a smaller, lighter Netbook to use on the plane if I'm just going to have to haul around a second laptop for when I get where I'm going to actually be able to do anything useful.
Regarding the 2 GB of RAM, you really don't want to page to a flash drive, so you really need enough RAM to keep paging to an absolute minimum or you are wearing out your hardware. Also, when a bare-bones boot of Mac OS X takes about half a gig by itself (600 megs right now with one Safari window and one Terminal window open), a gig is an absolute minimum even if you aren't worried about paging traffic wearing out your flash drive.... 2 GB seems like a reasonable compromise. My current laptop has 3 GB.
Regarding 64-bit Atom, no, I'm not smoking crack. The desktop Atom variants support x86-64. IMHO, designing a new computer with a 32-bit CPU is like designing a car that required leaded gasoline after they announced that they were phasing it out....
Regarding ExpressCard, it doesn't seem that extreme to me. It's not like we're talking about a huge chunk of board real estate---you are likely to have a PCI Express chipset anyway, so it's pretty much a trivial amount of silicon plus a connector---and with the space you gain from ditching the optical drive, I think it's a perfectly reasonable addition that doesn't add much to the cost.
Which brings me to a better faith-related question:
In light of the complex moral issues we face every day, which do you think is more Christian---nay, more Christ-like---legislating one's own moral values, thus forcing others to conform to them, or allowing others to choose for themselves to believe in and obey that moral code? Put another way, do you believe that moral acts performed only because one is compelled to perform them represent a true path to salvation, or do you believe that it only really counts if a person actively chooses to do good of their own free will?