Intelligent Design does not rule out evolution in the sense you described. Programmers use "genetic" or "evolutionary" algorithms all the time - and that is an example of intelligent design.
I see it in my house where I run my own mail server and my own spam filter. It's a bayesian filter so you have to tell it when it was wrong. Wife won't tell it anything but she complains about the spam she's getting. Can't help her. She's being obstinant and dumb.
Pymilter doesn't need user training. It uses mail to honeypot addresses to train for spam: create an address and put it on your website where spammers can see it, but use all email to that address (or addresses) to train the filter as spam. Then, add all addresses a user sends to and add it to a whitelist. If incoming whitelisted mail can be authenticated via SPF or DKIM, use it to train the filter as ham. I also have a blacklist. All mail from blacklisted domains is used to train the filter as spam. Emails are auto-blacklisted if they cannot be authenticated via SPF or CBV (call back validate to check that DSNs can be sent to alleged sender).
The only thing the user has to do is check the quarantine via a webapp if they think a message might be missing. False positives are extremely rare. An enhancement would be to accept feedback when offered. But the honeypot and blacklisting already provide a huge source of confirmed spam for training. It is harder to get confirmed ham for training. (Messages released from quarantine are of course confirmed ham.)
I always liked Sci-Fi stories where aliens had alien chemistry. There was one where creatures lived on the Sun with bodies formed of plasma shaped by intricately twisted magnetic fields. They were spacefaring, but one of the hazards was annoying chunks of cold dark matter in the orbital plane. (what was God thinking?) One touch was instant death for a Sun person. Another had inhabitants of Jupiter swimming in methane seas and smelting solid hydrogen for tools.
I started riding my bike to work (7 miles) a year ago - because of the price of gas, not because I like exercise. However, a side benefit is that my blood pressure has dropped substantially. It was 140/90, and last I checked it was 115/75. My route takes me through a park, where deer stare at me as I ride past (I am careful not to brush against any foliage so as to pick up any deer ticks). Crazy drivers try to run me over, but that is a simple danger. Sunburn and poison ivy are more complex, but still less than 24 hours for a resolution. So overall, stress is reduced.
There is plenty of non orange soil to build on. Orange soil is perfectly safe as long as you don't dig it up. The only reason to build on the orange soil, instead of leaving it as a park, is the intense housing pressure in Northern Virginia. In other words, moolah. The companies digging up the orange soil to build stuff made all kinds of promises about how careful they were going to be, and how they would always keep the orange soil wet until it was buried again and never ever let it become dust to blow in the wind, and how they would provide monitoring stations to ensure that none of the dust that they weren't going to make was blowing into nearby developments, and how they promised to be liable for anyone who could be shown to have been exposed by their digging. So yes, I would hold them to their promises. But they won't be around 30 years from now, so it is a safe bet for them. Hopefully, they were true to their word about the preventative measures (although leaving the stuff in the ground is the best preventative measure), and no one will have a problem.
30 years ago, there was a Buddist temple that started building on orange soil. Their construction was halted. They just didn't have the money to push their temple through. That has not been a problem for the current crop of orange soil builders.
I think that there is more danger in the trip to the grocery store wit your car, than there is in the additives in the soda pop you buy there.
Driving your car is a simple danger. You know immediately upon arrival whether you dodged that 2 ton bullet. However, you won't know for 10 years whether that hamburger you ate gave you mad cow disease. I won't know for 30 years whether the orange soil (containing natural asbestos) construction sites in my area has given me lung cancer (and the companies responsible for digging up the stuff will be out of business, so I won't be able to sue them). Apparently you have to wait 40 years before you know whether the sodium benzoate you are drinking gave you parkinsons. (I gave up sodas for unsweetened green tea 10 years ago because the concentrated sugar/corn syrup alone was killing me in much more immediately noticeable ways.)
I find simple dangers much easier to handle than complex ones. Our area (Virgina) has Lyme disease and copperhead snakes. You won't know for a year whether an unnoticed tick from your walk in the woods gave you Lyme disease - a life long debilitating illness. But you know right away whether a snake bit you. The complex dangers just pile up in my mind with no resolution, causing a general background of stress of worry. The simple dangers cause momentary stress that is soon resolved, leaving a feeling of relief. I can see getting addicted to simple dangers just to experience the relief at the end.
The example is one of God forgiving people who explicitly did not ask for forgiveness. Hence, it is a counter example to your objection that "xianity says God can't forgive people unless they ask". In fact, standard Christian doctrine is that God forgives everyone without their asking. For example, "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." The tone of your objection suggests that you are perhaps concerned about why God doesn't just wave his hand and undo the bad temporal (physical) consequences of our choices (the technical Catholic term for that is "indulgence"). Obviously, such interventions are not repeatable, and doing it wholesale would make science rather hard, but many people have testified that God does do it on occasion (and a few are even credible). Just like physical actions have physical consequences, there are also spiritual consequences to our choices. Perhaps you are thinking of Calvinist style xianity (predestination, limited atonement, etc). The Calvinist statements attempt to describe God's point of view - and hence are abstract, theoretical and metaphysical.
If people will click on the ads on a site because it's exactly what they're searching for, then the ad site has actually provided a service. In the case of palmsprings.com, I looked, and it is a collection of ad banners for lots of tourist stuff, but actually organized with category links leading to more ad filled pages. I wouldn't call that fraud. That is a service like a decentralized yellow pages.
god can do anything *except* forgive people who don't ask for forgiveness
You haven't examined Xtianity very closely. Just to mention one of the more famous counter examples:
Forgive them, for they know not what they do. I think your objection is more along the lines of "Why does God let people go to Hell, when He could stop them if He wanted to?"
Microsoft games would be just as good for grammar stage learning, but once you get to the logic stage of child development, there is a world of difference. (Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric are terms from the Trivium concept of classical education.) At the logic stage (which kicks in sometime between age 6 and 21 depending on the child - bell curve thing peaking around junior high), kids want to understand how things work, not just memorize facts. M$ actively prevents going very deep into how their system works. That is why I've seen all the students at the Logic stage saddled with M$ donated equipment and software go out and buy TI calculators that they can barely afford. The reason is that they can access a much lower level. I watch them explain symbol tables and software interrupt vectors to each other saying, "Cool!" and such.
In the class I teach, they use a Linux system (FC4), and can do the same thing, plus have a vast library of real code to look at. Many of my students are handicapped with parent provided Windows computers at home. Fortunately, there are interpreter based systems like Squeak and Python that run on Windows and let them dive into a lot of low level details (just not to the hardware level).
The bottom line is that an OSS based computer, whether Intel or OLPC, will be far more valuable for computer science education of interested logic stage and older kids. In the poor areas being targeted, either system will need to be useful for a long time. I can see a synergy between the two hardware devices. Use OSS software for both systems. Use the Intel Classmate for computers that stay in the classroom as a resource. Use OLPC as take home devices owned by the children.
If people recklessly causing or attempting to cause death can't already be imprisoned for life in your country then you've got bigger problems than copyright infringement.
Recklessly causing or attempting to cause death is already a potential life or even capital crime. This proposed bill is redundant in the same way as the upcoming "hate crimes" bill, which makes it a crime to kill people because of race, religion, or sexual preference. Of course, it is *already* a life or capital crime to kill people for any reason (unless they are unborn or severely disabled).
Even without downloadable firmware, any card or motherboard device could have evil permanent firmware. Downloadable blobs don't add any additional security risk beyond what the public internet presents. As long as the card hardware enforces memory windows and PCI protocol, and the kernel driver is secure, an evil firmware blob is limited - just like worms on the internet. Granted, a blob that exploits a security hole in the kernel driver or PCI hardware in conjunction with some means of propagating over the internet would be one killer worm...and I doubt anyone has done penetration testing on either. Just like sendmail, it will take the first damaging worm before PCI (or FutureBus) security is taken seriously.
I agree that hard core Linux gamers are an edge case. However, most of us would like to be able to play Penguin Racer or Tux Kart occasionally. Useless eye candy like 3D window switching effects help relieve boredom as well. This doesn't require the latest hot graphics card with dedicated cooling towers. However, it would be nice to have stable drivers that track kernel evolution for entry level 3D cards - sufficient for simple games and effects. The present situation is that old low end Vanta Nvidia cards (suitable for Tux Kart) still require proprietary drivers - and Nvidia is losing the motivation to keep them updated (they did patch old drivers for the security hole mentioned on Slashdot a while back).
IMO, using binary blobs that run in the card, not in the kernel (i.e. downloadable firmware), are a reasonable way for vendors to hide trade secrets while keeping the card updateable and the kernel driver open source. As long as shared memory between the graphics card and main system is restricted to a window, bugs in the firmware shouldn't cause security holes in the kernel. In fact, one benefit of micro-kernel architecture is that isolated drivers that run in their own process and address space, can run in an intelligent I/O card instead.
The IBM Series/1 was built on the principle. All I/O was done by intelligent cards with a common API: submit Device Control Block with command, memory block, and parameters to start an operation. Receive vectored interrupt and find results in updated DCB and memory block. Interrupt included address of DCB, so interrupts were trivially "object oriented".
You can't snapshot things that aren't logical volumes in ZFS or AIX either. You just don't normally access the raw physical device. Many of those complaints made against Linux are of the "doctor, doctor, it hurts when I do this" variety. Don't like those crufty DOS era partition tables? Don't use them! Run pvcreate directly on/dev/hda or whatever. Yes, grub understands LVM now (and LILO never needed to).
One legitimate complaint is the poor state of integrated RAID support in the linux LVM. Yes, the LVM can mirror logical volumes now, but it is very klunky (I miss AIX LVM). Creating PVs on top of md devices is tedious and error prone (because you often need to split physical devices into multiple partitions to avoid resyncing the world). The LVM should at least support RAID 0 and 1.
Another complaint is the lack of consistent high level utilities for file system admin. On AIX, one command allocates a logical volume and creates a filesystem on it (or you can do the steps separately for greater control). Linux makes you create the LV, then create the filesystem. Worse, linux used to offer e2fsadm to resize a filesystem and the underlying LV. Now, you have to run lvextend THEN resize2fs - or the reverse if shrinking (and you had better type those sizes right). While it is nice to have access to raw LVs for some things, I really don't want to have to manually compute volume sizes - with potential data destruction in case of mistakes.
But he accepted that DVDs that had had their copy protection removed were "now in the clear" and could be copied.
That is the part that ticks me off the most. The DVDs already could be copied without the key. Their "technology" is "playback protection", not "copy protection". The only honest sentence in the quote was earlier, where he said, "Some titles could now be played on more than one software player." Yes, THAT is what your evil scheme is trying to prevent. (Not that I will ever buy HD DVDs until I can actually play them whenever/wherever I want.)
As long as "playback protection" is working, you can't actually "buy" an HD DVD. You can only rent the privilege of playing it under conditions specified by the publisher. Whatever happened to laws against false advertising?
The policy is not completely loony. The biggest sponsors have the most to lose monetarily from a serious problem. The problem is that when corporations get too big, they seem no longer capable of acting rationally in their own financial best interest (e.g. Sony, Microsoft long term), so the profit motive loses effectiveness.
we might see M$ successfully defend against this stupid patent by citing Java as prior art. The evil patent shark is smacked down, and M$ is publically embarrassed. What could be better? Oh wait, what about the Sun haters...
Bounces are delivered to the MAIL FROM in the SMTP envelope defined by rfc 2821. This is not the From: mail header field defined by rfc 2821, although they are often the same address. The MAIL FROM is best protected by publishing an SPF record in DNS as defined by rfc 4408. See http://openspf.org./ This defines which IP addresses are authorized to send email using your address in MAIL FROM.
Since not all recipients check SPF, you may also wish to sign your mail from. This adds a timed hash token to the local part, and bounces must have the proper token in the RCPT TO or they are rejected. I use sendmail and the pysrs package from the pymilter project for this purpose.
If this comes to pass, companies can distribute closed source products based on GPL software - as long as they are free as in beer. Imagine the possibilities. This idea is solving the wrong problem. The root problem is not copyright law, it is the monopoly old style record labels still hold over music distribution - and all the artists that have signed their life away in the (perhaps justified) belief that it was the only way they would ever be able "do" music.
So someone who walks the walks is an astroturfer, but conspicuous CO2 emitters are apostles. No wonder Garbage Magazine went out of business. Even Nature Conservancy has dropped conserving ecosystems and jumped on the GW bandwagon. Yes, I am not a climate expert. The lack of evidence understandable to laymen without a lot of experts waving their hands and telling me what it means is one problem. (Also, we still have a long way to go to get as warm as the medieval period, and that was *better* climate wise than where we are now. But the experts keep telling me it will be worse.) Another problem is that I don't sense any sincere concern for the environment in those preaching Global Warming. All they seem to want is world domination. (This means you, parent poster.)
That is why I call them neo-communists. The old communists pointed to social injustice, and called for revolution as the cure. But all they really wanted was to run the country. The injustice only got worse under their rule. The neo-communists point to a potential environmental problem, and call for an economic revolution as the cure. But all they really want is to run the world. I suspect the environmental problems (not to mention injustice) will only get worse under their rule.
Slashdot Mirror
Brusselsprouts! There goes the SETI program too - one of my favorites.
Intelligent Design does not rule out evolution in the sense you described. Programmers use "genetic" or "evolutionary" algorithms all the time - and that is an example of intelligent design.
Pymilter doesn't need user training. It uses mail to honeypot addresses to train for spam: create an address and put it on your website where spammers can see it, but use all email to that address (or addresses) to train the filter as spam. Then, add all addresses a user sends to and add it to a whitelist. If incoming whitelisted mail can be authenticated via SPF or DKIM, use it to train the filter as ham. I also have a blacklist. All mail from blacklisted domains is used to train the filter as spam. Emails are auto-blacklisted if they cannot be authenticated via SPF or CBV (call back validate to check that DSNs can be sent to alleged sender).
The only thing the user has to do is check the quarantine via a webapp if they think a message might be missing. False positives are extremely rare. An enhancement would be to accept feedback when offered. But the honeypot and blacklisting already provide a huge source of confirmed spam for training. It is harder to get confirmed ham for training. (Messages released from quarantine are of course confirmed ham.)
I always liked Sci-Fi stories where aliens had alien chemistry. There was one where creatures lived on the Sun with bodies formed of plasma shaped by intricately twisted magnetic fields. They were spacefaring, but one of the hazards was annoying chunks of cold dark matter in the orbital plane. (what was God thinking?) One touch was instant death for a Sun person. Another had inhabitants of Jupiter swimming in methane seas and smelting solid hydrogen for tools.
I started riding my bike to work (7 miles) a year ago - because of the price of gas, not because I like exercise. However, a side benefit is that my blood pressure has dropped substantially. It was 140/90, and last I checked it was 115/75. My route takes me through a park, where deer stare at me as I ride past (I am careful not to brush against any foliage so as to pick up any deer ticks). Crazy drivers try to run me over, but that is a simple danger. Sunburn and poison ivy are more complex, but still less than 24 hours for a resolution. So overall, stress is reduced.
30 years ago, there was a Buddist temple that started building on orange soil. Their construction was halted. They just didn't have the money to push their temple through. That has not been a problem for the current crop of orange soil builders.
Driving your car is a simple danger. You know immediately upon arrival whether you dodged that 2 ton bullet. However, you won't know for 10 years whether that hamburger you ate gave you mad cow disease. I won't know for 30 years whether the orange soil (containing natural asbestos) construction sites in my area has given me lung cancer (and the companies responsible for digging up the stuff will be out of business, so I won't be able to sue them). Apparently you have to wait 40 years before you know whether the sodium benzoate you are drinking gave you parkinsons. (I gave up sodas for unsweetened green tea 10 years ago because the concentrated sugar/corn syrup alone was killing me in much more immediately noticeable ways.)
I find simple dangers much easier to handle than complex ones. Our area (Virgina) has Lyme disease and copperhead snakes. You won't know for a year whether an unnoticed tick from your walk in the woods gave you Lyme disease - a life long debilitating illness. But you know right away whether a snake bit you. The complex dangers just pile up in my mind with no resolution, causing a general background of stress of worry. The simple dangers cause momentary stress that is soon resolved, leaving a feeling of relief. I can see getting addicted to simple dangers just to experience the relief at the end.
The example is one of God forgiving people who explicitly did not ask for forgiveness. Hence, it is a counter example to your objection that "xianity says God can't forgive people unless they ask". In fact, standard Christian doctrine is that God forgives everyone without their asking. For example, "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." The tone of your objection suggests that you are perhaps concerned about why God doesn't just wave his hand and undo the bad temporal (physical) consequences of our choices (the technical Catholic term for that is "indulgence"). Obviously, such interventions are not repeatable, and doing it wholesale would make science rather hard, but many people have testified that God does do it on occasion (and a few are even credible). Just like physical actions have physical consequences, there are also spiritual consequences to our choices. Perhaps you are thinking of Calvinist style xianity (predestination, limited atonement, etc). The Calvinist statements attempt to describe God's point of view - and hence are abstract, theoretical and metaphysical.
If people will click on the ads on a site because it's exactly what they're searching for, then the ad site has actually provided a service. In the case of palmsprings.com, I looked, and it is a collection of ad banners for lots of tourist stuff, but actually organized with category links leading to more ad filled pages. I wouldn't call that fraud. That is a service like a decentralized yellow pages.
You haven't examined Xtianity very closely. Just to mention one of the more famous counter examples: Forgive them, for they know not what they do. I think your objection is more along the lines of "Why does God let people go to Hell, when He could stop them if He wanted to?"
Microsoft games would be just as good for grammar stage learning, but once you get to the logic stage of child development, there is a world of difference. (Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric are terms from the Trivium concept of classical education.) At the logic stage (which kicks in sometime between age 6 and 21 depending on the child - bell curve thing peaking around junior high), kids want to understand how things work, not just memorize facts. M$ actively prevents going very deep into how their system works. That is why I've seen all the students at the Logic stage saddled with M$ donated equipment and software go out and buy TI calculators that they can barely afford. The reason is that they can access a much lower level. I watch them explain symbol tables and software interrupt vectors to each other saying, "Cool!" and such.
In the class I teach, they use a Linux system (FC4), and can do the same thing, plus have a vast library of real code to look at. Many of my students are handicapped with parent provided Windows computers at home. Fortunately, there are interpreter based systems like Squeak and Python that run on Windows and let them dive into a lot of low level details (just not to the hardware level).
The bottom line is that an OSS based computer, whether Intel or OLPC, will be far more valuable for computer science education of interested logic stage and older kids. In the poor areas being targeted, either system will need to be useful for a long time. I can see a synergy between the two hardware devices. Use OSS software for both systems. Use the Intel Classmate for computers that stay in the classroom as a resource. Use OLPC as take home devices owned by the children.
Recklessly causing or attempting to cause death is already a potential life or even capital crime. This proposed bill is redundant in the same way as the upcoming "hate crimes" bill, which makes it a crime to kill people because of race, religion, or sexual preference. Of course, it is *already* a life or capital crime to kill people for any reason (unless they are unborn or severely disabled).
Is the timing of the leak related to this?
Jail time a comin', courtesy Gonzales.
Even without downloadable firmware, any card or motherboard device could have evil permanent firmware. Downloadable blobs don't add any additional security risk beyond what the public internet presents. As long as the card hardware enforces memory windows and PCI protocol, and the kernel driver is secure, an evil firmware blob is limited - just like worms on the internet. Granted, a blob that exploits a security hole in the kernel driver or PCI hardware in conjunction with some means of propagating over the internet would be one killer worm...and I doubt anyone has done penetration testing on either. Just like sendmail, it will take the first damaging worm before PCI (or FutureBus) security is taken seriously.
IMO, using binary blobs that run in the card, not in the kernel (i.e. downloadable firmware), are a reasonable way for vendors to hide trade secrets while keeping the card updateable and the kernel driver open source. As long as shared memory between the graphics card and main system is restricted to a window, bugs in the firmware shouldn't cause security holes in the kernel. In fact, one benefit of micro-kernel architecture is that isolated drivers that run in their own process and address space, can run in an intelligent I/O card instead.
The IBM Series/1 was built on the principle. All I/O was done by intelligent cards with a common API: submit Device Control Block with command, memory block, and parameters to start an operation. Receive vectored interrupt and find results in updated DCB and memory block. Interrupt included address of DCB, so interrupts were trivially "object oriented".
Millions of innocent human beings gruesomely executed each year - and that has nothing to do with social justice?
One legitimate complaint is the poor state of integrated RAID support in the linux LVM. Yes, the LVM can mirror logical volumes now, but it is very klunky (I miss AIX LVM). Creating PVs on top of md devices is tedious and error prone (because you often need to split physical devices into multiple partitions to avoid resyncing the world). The LVM should at least support RAID 0 and 1.
Another complaint is the lack of consistent high level utilities for file system admin. On AIX, one command allocates a logical volume and creates a filesystem on it (or you can do the steps separately for greater control). Linux makes you create the LV, then create the filesystem. Worse, linux used to offer e2fsadm to resize a filesystem and the underlying LV. Now, you have to run lvextend THEN resize2fs - or the reverse if shrinking (and you had better type those sizes right). While it is nice to have access to raw LVs for some things, I really don't want to have to manually compute volume sizes - with potential data destruction in case of mistakes.
That is the part that ticks me off the most. The DVDs already could be copied without the key. Their "technology" is "playback protection", not "copy protection". The only honest sentence in the quote was earlier, where he said, "Some titles could now be played on more than one software player." Yes, THAT is what your evil scheme is trying to prevent. (Not that I will ever buy HD DVDs until I can actually play them whenever/wherever I want.)
As long as "playback protection" is working, you can't actually "buy" an HD DVD. You can only rent the privilege of playing it under conditions specified by the publisher. Whatever happened to laws against false advertising?
The policy is not completely loony. The biggest sponsors have the most to lose monetarily from a serious problem. The problem is that when corporations get too big, they seem no longer capable of acting rationally in their own financial best interest (e.g. Sony, Microsoft long term), so the profit motive loses effectiveness.
we might see M$ successfully defend against this stupid patent by citing Java as prior art. The evil patent shark is smacked down, and M$ is publically embarrassed. What could be better? Oh wait, what about the Sun haters...
Since not all recipients check SPF, you may also wish to sign your mail from. This adds a timed hash token to the local part, and bounces must have the proper token in the RCPT TO or they are rejected. I use sendmail and the pysrs package from the pymilter project for this purpose.
The GPL relies on copyright law for enforcement. It uses copyright to prevent abuse of copyright. That is why it is called copyleft.
If this comes to pass, companies can distribute closed source products based on GPL software - as long as they are free as in beer. Imagine the possibilities. This idea is solving the wrong problem. The root problem is not copyright law, it is the monopoly old style record labels still hold over music distribution - and all the artists that have signed their life away in the (perhaps justified) belief that it was the only way they would ever be able "do" music.
That is why I call them neo-communists. The old communists pointed to social injustice, and called for revolution as the cure. But all they really wanted was to run the country. The injustice only got worse under their rule. The neo-communists point to a potential environmental problem, and call for an economic revolution as the cure. But all they really want is to run the world. I suspect the environmental problems (not to mention injustice) will only get worse under their rule.