And as a Christian I have every right to say that Homo-sexuality is unnatural.
I fail to see what your Christian belief has to do with your opinion that being homosexual is unnatural. If you were an atheist, it would be wrong to think homosexuality is unnatural?
Please realize that two of my best friends are Gay. I let them know my viewpoints, and I accept them for the choices they have made. I try to follow the example of Love the Sinner and Hate the Sins. I'm not perfect, neither are they. And they have accepted my viewpoints so I know I'm doing something right.
What do you mean by "choices"? Being gay (or straight, for that matter) is as much a choice as having blond or brown hair. You can fake your hair color by dyeing it, but that won't change your real hair color.
And where do you get the idea being a homosexual is a sin? Every time I ask a Christian why God lets so many people die of famine every day, their answer is "The Lord works in mysterious ways". But it seems that on the subject of sexual preference, the Lords ways are crystal clear. If we are all children of God (gay people as well as straight people), then God must have created gay people as being gay. Which means God must have some reason for creating gay people. Even if you believe that being gay is a sin, I still admire your "love the sinner, not the sin" way of thinking. If more people would do that, gay people wouldn't be the social outcasts they sometimes are now.
It's 'supposedly' wrong for me to say that your wrong and living against the Bible (not that I would force the bible one you personally, but I will let you know my opinion on the matter), but it's OKAY for you to say that I'm wrong and judge me for my following my religion? Its okay for you to judge my life and call me a bigot (or worse - out of your ignorance), but it's not okay for me to believe what I want to believe? that my friends is hypocracy.
There is a difference between respecting someones opinion and agreeing with someone. I always try to respect other peoples opinions, no matter how hard I disagree sometimes. It seems to me you are trying to do the same.
I personally believe that it IS wrong to be Gay. that's what the bible says. But that's YOUR personal choice to make if your believe likewise. The only one that should be judging you, from a strictly christian point of view, should be God. Not the Christian. Are there hypoctrical and self righteous christians that do? yes. And that's just as hypocritical, imo.
Can you tell me where in the bible this is stated? And there are a lot of things the Bible says are wrong, but we do them anyway. For example: "You shall not drink an other mans blood"... Does this mean you shouldn't get a blood transfusion when you had an accident?
When I die, I believe God will judge me and how I conducted myself. I don't believe God will judge my sexual preference, as I don't believe He will judge the color of my hair or the size of my shoes (other things I haven't chosen).
To me, being a Christian means helping other people to the best of my abilities and to love my neighbour as I love myself. It doesn't mean judging people on completely arbitrary characteristics.
This reminds me of Bayesian spam filtering. In this analogy the spam filter is the essay grading program and the spam message is the essay to be graded.
According to the article, the essay grading software deducts it score from statistical analysis of the essay, this is the same a Bayesian spam-filter does to rate a message spam or ham.
The 'solution' spammers found to defeat Bayesian spam filters, is to fill the body and/or subject with common words, forming grammatically correct sentences, that are semantical rubbish.
Here is an example of a few sentences found in this kind of spam messages:
If you will improve Wail's window at games, it will quickly converse the
bucket. Feyd wastes the potter between hers and daily kicks. Lakhdar, have a dry dog. You won't like it. While oranges lazily help enigmas, the books often depart at the weak codes. Are you shallow, I mean, talking with easy cobblers? It will taste locally, unless Muhammad pours stickers below Frederic's sauce. Where did Michael reject the grocer near the sweet tag? She'd rather fear stupidly than grasp with Oscar's strange pin.
As you can see, this is clearly garbage, but to a computer grading this text using statistical analysis methods, this might well be an award-winning essay.
All you would need is a database of nouns, proper nouns, verbs and a few templates for sentences, questions etc. You could even do just with some templates for sentences and have your essay-writing program contact http://dictionary.com or some similar website to get the words to fill in your template.
If you all are so afraid of this Bill being passed in Congress, why don't you learn something from how things are going here in Europe about software patents?
If you try to educate Joe Average about how bad this is for them, maybe close down a few (by which I mean a lot) websites and arrange for a protest to be held in front of the White House, maybe you can stop this Bill from passing? At least you may be able to delay the voting for a month and buy more time to educate people and have them write to their people in the Congress.
Just to make things clear, I'm a Belgian myself. So if any of the things I stated above are not feasable or doable, it's because I don't know the way things are done in the USA in detail. If you are already sure that this Bill is going to pass, you can do nothing but wait and see just that happening. But IMHO a better way is to let those who make your laws know you don't want this Bill to be passed. Let people know just why this is so bad for them. If the members of the Congress don't want to listen to the people who voted for them, but just to the large companies who are going to make a lot of money from this Bill, then there is a serious problem in your democratic system. Laws are made for the people, not for a few big companies to increase their profit.
Too bad the author didn't write about what can be done to prevent spam from happening.
Following things come to mind (some are quite obvious, on the other hand your average user doesn't know these things can have a big impact):
react against HTML email
Turn off JavaScript/previewing of messages (or even just images), so web bugs won't be activated
Never open attachments of unknown origin (this particular practice has been stressed a lot lately (think trojans), but still people seem to happily open every file they get in their email)
Don't react to spam (quote from the article: "As long as the profit motive remains, so will the problem.")
Don't use the unsubscribe button (it reveals as much information as a web bug does)
There are probably more do's and especially don'ts I forgot to mention.
As long as Joe and Jane Average User stay uneducated about spam, they will keep on reacting to it and help the problem remain (or even escalate).
With all the skinning and theme-ing most Windows users I know do, it's hard to think they use the same GUI.
If in my dorm some windows user for example has problems with her Internet connection and asks me to come and take a look, I usually have to search for a while to find the Network Neighbourhood icon. When finally find it and open the Properties dialog box, I get a slight headache from the colors they decided they find pretty. And when someone found out about WinBlinds and told his friends about it, things became even worse (you can really change the appearance of a desktop using that program). And this is just the user changing some preferences and using a theme.
Microsoft itself doesn't have a consistent GUI itself. Ever seen the Load... dialog box used in MS Office 2000? I've never seen those in any application before (not even other MS apps). Microsoft changes the user interface in it's own apps.
So, despite the 'fact' that Windows has one GUI, even Microsoft designs it's own dialog boxes to use in it's applications.
>into Windows. If it was proven that they did >they would be either driven out of business by >lawsuits or they would be so disgraced not even >their best marketting people could get their >good name back in the eyes of the public.
You think so? They are getting away with selling operating systems full of bugs for like fifteen years already! And still they are the most popular software company... Do you think so many people would suddenly change their operating system because they know "certain information" about what they do is monitored? If all people were that smart and had that much knowledge (Windows is an operating system that can even be used by a complete computer newbie), everyone would be using linux by now:)
Slashdot Mirror
I usually just use dG (saves on keystrokes).
And as a Christian I have every right to say that Homo-sexuality is unnatural.
I fail to see what your Christian belief has to do with your opinion that being homosexual is unnatural. If you were an atheist, it would be wrong to think homosexuality is unnatural?
Please realize that two of my best friends are Gay. I let them know my viewpoints, and I accept them for the choices they have made. I try to follow the example of Love the Sinner and Hate the Sins. I'm not perfect, neither are they. And they have accepted my viewpoints so I know I'm doing something right.
What do you mean by "choices"? Being gay (or straight, for that matter) is as much a choice as having blond or brown hair. You can fake your hair color by dyeing it, but that won't change your real hair color.
And where do you get the idea being a homosexual is a sin? Every time I ask a Christian why God lets so many people die of famine every day, their answer is "The Lord works in mysterious ways". But it seems that on the subject of sexual preference, the Lords ways are crystal clear. If we are all children of God (gay people as well as straight people), then God must have created gay people as being gay. Which means God must have some reason for creating gay people.
Even if you believe that being gay is a sin, I still admire your "love the sinner, not the sin" way of thinking. If more people would do that, gay people wouldn't be the social outcasts they sometimes are now.
It's 'supposedly' wrong for me to say that your wrong and living against the Bible (not that I would force the bible one you personally, but I will let you know my opinion on the matter), but it's OKAY for you to say that I'm wrong and judge me for my following my religion? Its okay for you to judge my life and call me a bigot (or worse - out of your ignorance), but it's not okay for me to believe what I want to believe? that my friends is hypocracy.
There is a difference between respecting someones opinion and agreeing with someone. I always try to respect other peoples opinions, no matter how hard I disagree sometimes.
It seems to me you are trying to do the same.
I personally believe that it IS wrong to be Gay. that's what the bible says. But that's YOUR personal choice to make if your believe likewise. The only one that should be judging you, from a strictly christian point of view, should be God. Not the Christian. Are there hypoctrical and self righteous christians that do? yes. And that's just as hypocritical, imo.
Can you tell me where in the bible this is stated? And there are a lot of things the Bible says are wrong, but we do them anyway. For example: "You shall not drink an other mans blood"... Does this mean you shouldn't get a blood transfusion when you had an accident?
When I die, I believe God will judge me and how I conducted myself. I don't believe God will judge my sexual preference, as I don't believe He will judge the color of my hair or the size of my shoes (other things I haven't chosen).
To me, being a Christian means helping other people to the best of my abilities and to love my neighbour as I love myself. It doesn't mean judging people on completely arbitrary characteristics.
According to the article, the essay grading software deducts it score from statistical analysis of the essay, this is the same a Bayesian spam-filter does to rate a message spam or ham.
The 'solution' spammers found to defeat Bayesian spam filters, is to fill the body and/or subject with common words, forming grammatically correct sentences, that are semantical rubbish.
Here is an example of a few sentences found in this kind of spam messages:
As you can see, this is clearly garbage, but to a computer grading this text using statistical analysis methods, this might well be an award-winning essay.
All you would need is a database of nouns, proper nouns, verbs and a few templates for sentences, questions etc. You could even do just with some templates for sentences and have your essay-writing program contact http://dictionary.com or some similar website to get the words to fill in your template.
Sven
If you all are so afraid of this Bill being passed in Congress, why don't you learn something from how things are going here in Europe about software patents?
If you try to educate Joe Average about how bad this is for them, maybe close down a few (by which I mean a lot) websites and arrange for a protest to be held in front of the White House, maybe you can stop this Bill from passing?
At least you may be able to delay the voting for a month and buy more time to educate people and have them write to their people in the Congress.
Just to make things clear, I'm a Belgian myself. So if any of the things I stated above are not feasable or doable, it's because I don't know the way things are done in the USA in detail.
If you are already sure that this Bill is going to pass, you can do nothing but wait and see just that happening. But IMHO a better way is to let those who make your laws know you don't want this Bill to be passed. Let people know just why this is so bad for them.
If the members of the Congress don't want to listen to the people who voted for them, but just to the large companies who are going to make a lot of money from this Bill, then there is a serious problem in your democratic system. Laws are made for the people, not for a few big companies to increase their profit.
Sven
Following things come to mind (some are quite obvious, on the other hand your average user doesn't know these things can have a big impact):
There are probably more do's and especially don'ts I forgot to mention.
As long as Joe and Jane Average User stay uneducated about spam, they will keep on reacting to it and help the problem remain (or even escalate).
Sven
With all the skinning and theme-ing most Windows users I know do, it's hard to think they use the same GUI.
If in my dorm some windows user for example has problems with her Internet connection and asks me to come and take a look, I usually have to search for a while to find the Network Neighbourhood icon. When finally find it and open the Properties dialog box, I get a slight headache from the colors they decided they find pretty.
And when someone found out about WinBlinds and told his friends about it, things became even worse (you can really change the appearance of a desktop using that program).
And this is just the user changing some preferences and using a theme.
Microsoft itself doesn't have a consistent GUI itself. Ever seen the Load... dialog box used in MS Office 2000? I've never seen those in any application before (not even other MS apps).
Microsoft changes the user interface in it's own apps.
So, despite the 'fact' that Windows has one GUI, even Microsoft designs it's own dialog boxes to use in it's applications.
Sven
>into Windows. If it was proven that they did
:)
>they would be either driven out of business by
>lawsuits or they would be so disgraced not even
>their best marketting people could get their
>good name back in the eyes of the public.
You think so? They are getting away with selling operating systems full of bugs for like fifteen years already! And still they are the most popular software company... Do you think so many people would suddenly change their operating system because they know "certain information" about what they do is monitored?
If all people were that smart and had that much knowledge (Windows is an operating system that can even be used by a complete computer newbie), everyone would be using linux by now
svEn