Quinlan: Any technique that tries to identify "good" mail without authentication backing it up, or some form of personalized training. It worked well for a while, but it's definitely not an effective technique today.
What's wrong with personalized training? I get more spam than almost anyone I know, and SpamBayes does a fantastic job for me.
The Hush is crazy expensive, no doubt about that. But if you are willing to forgo the 1.2GHz processor (even just settling for 1.0GHz), see my response to the other post--you can put together a lot of computer for significantly under $500 (though not counting Windows--once you throw software into the equation, the Mac Mini pulls way ahead IMO).
What's most interesting to me about that configuration is the VIA EPIA. For $99 you get a 6.75" x 6.75" motherboard, a cool-running 800MHz processor, built-in networking/audio/video/USB (with TV-out and S/PDIF), two DIMM slots and a PCI slot. It's hard to build any computer around that and have it not end up a bargain! (For example, my personal mail server which totaled just over $200.)
I wasn't presenting alternatives to the Mac Mini. I was responding to this comment:
Why is it so hard to make a decent-looking case that doesn't look like someone riced it up with stupid lights or clear plastic? I just ordered the parts to build a PC, and the hardest part was finding a case that didn't look like crap. I wasn't successful.
But if you do want to make a direct comparison, I'll bite. First, I bought the Mac Mini, in fact I waited in line on 1/22 at my local Apple store and was the first person to buy one there. It is definitely a great value for such a small, sexy device, and I can easily recommend it to anyone who needs a living room computer for basic computing needs.
But to be fair, the x86 offerings are nothing to sneeze at either. If you can deal with an 800MHz EPIA (more than adequate for SOHO server tasks), a combo with Silverstone LC09 ($150) + VIA EPIA 800 ($100 from idot.com) + 256MB PC133 ($50) + hard drive ($50) = $350, unless I am forgetting something. Or you can upgrade to a Celeron or Pentium 4 for an additional $60 plus the price of the CPU (unfortunately the cheapest P4 is a steep $125 on NewEgg, but you can get Celerons for as little as $60).
On the other side of the spectrum, I'm typing this on a Shuttle SN85G4 with an Athlon 64 and a WD Raptor hard drive. This rig is faster than any Mac except (arguably) the Power Mac, for a lot less money (it was $2000 a year ago).
There are a million reasons why none of the above are apples-to-apples comparisons to a Mac Mini, but, it seems clear that there are at least comparable values in the x86 world, at all points of the price/performance/size/style curve.
I hope you can return whatever ugly case you bought, because there are some pretty nice looking ones out there... you just have to look really really hard.
He may be guessing, but I think he's largely accurate, based on what I remember from researching the topic for a term paper a few years ago.
The Internet tax ban is on discriminatory taxes--taxes that only apply to Internet-based sales--and also tax on use of the Internet itself. Use taxes already apply to almost all Internet-based interstate transactions, just as they have always applied to catalog/mail-order sales. There's nothing unconstitutional about them. (What is probably unconstitutional is the federal government collecting tax on interstate commerce, or perhaps states levying discriminatory taxes against interstate commerce--that is, state-level import/export taxes. I'm not an expert in the Constitution or in tax law.)
The reason you currently don't pay a state or local tax on transactions where the seller does not have a physical presence in your state, is not because the tax itself is unconstitutional, but because it's an undue burden on the seller to have to figure out the intensely complicated state and local tax rates for everyone in the country. At least, this was the case almost 40 years ago when the US Supreme Court decided this (google for National Bella Hess, Inc. v. Dept. of Revenue of Illinois (1967)). So you actually do owe tax for every purchase, Internet or otherwise (unless you live in a state without sales/use tax)--it's just not legal for the state to require the seller to collect the tax, and it's not practical for the state to come after you.
Plenty of people are trying to change this sorry state of affairs, because as you say, the Internet wasn't around when the rules were made. The main approach seems to be to simplify the state and local sales tax codes across the country, so it would no longer be an undue burden on retailers to calculate the appropriate tax, and Bella Hess could be overturned. 1, 2, 3.
The article was specifically talking about developers.
McGrath went on to claim that another Linux myth centres on the number of open source developers who work to create the operating system.
"There a myth in the market that there are hundreds of thousands of people writing code for the Linux kernel. This is not the case; the number is hundreds, not thousands," he said.
"If you look at the number of people who contribute to the kernel tree, you see that a significant amount of the work is just done by a handful.
"There are very few of the improvements that come through the wider community. There are more skilled developers writing for the Microsoft platform than for open source.
"That part" was the whole point. You can create abstractions that embody the try/finally (or many other kinds of flow control logic), which is not possible (or at least, not convenient) in languages that do not have anonymous functions.
Imagine if, for example, Python didn't come with a built-in language construct for list comprehensions. You couldn't easily add a "list comprehension" function, whereas it'd be very easy in Ruby (and several other languages).
Your claim as I read it was that we can't comprehend God accurately enough to understand his motivations, and hence to be able to judge him fairly as a moral agent. My objection was that you do make claims about his motivation, and you do describe him (in favourable terms) as a moral agent. How come you get to do this and we don't? If you want to lean on the Bible as a source of privileged information, that's your prerogative, but you can't expect such a line to carry any weight with people who haven't drunk the Kool-Aid, and these are the people you're trying to convince.
Whoa, whoa. Once again, I don't think this line of investigation will lead anyone to believe in the authenticitiy and reliability of the Bible. It was the ancestor post that started this discussion by saying the tsunami disaster disproves the existence of an all-loving all-powerful god as described in the Judeo-Christian-Islam ethos. In other words, I am not attempting to convince you there is an all-powerful all-loving God, but rather, that human suffering does not preclude the existence of that God.
As a result, my job is only to introduce possible scenarios and constraints which can reconcile tsunamis and ALAP God, whereas your job is to show these scenarios impossible. Right?
I don't consider intellect to be a generic attribute.
Then I retract the comment. I certainly don't expect you to relate to Christians who are famous for their theology/philosophy.
Satisfactory to whom? To themselves, perhaps; our standards of intellectual rigour always slip when it comes to our most cherished beliefs.
I won't deny that I argue from my bias, or that Christian thinkers look hard for answers that correlate with scripture (though I don't believe most do so to the point of intellectual blindness or dishonesty). On the other hand, perhaps your own bias is what keeps you from accepting a perfectly reasonable conclusion.
(First, an aside: For my personal faith, I'm not sure God is or needs to be "omnipotent" in the way we have been discussing in this thread--I don't see evidence of it in the Bible. Here's what Nave's Topical Bible lists as the passages relating to God's omnipotence. But I'm more than happy to argue this side of it, since I do hold out the possibility that he is omnipotent, and because so many people seem to think that the alternative is that he doesn't exist.)
If a god is willing to let millions of Christians suffer and die, then he doesn't love them.
No Christian believes that their God is not willing to let his people suffer and die. After all, we are talking about a deity who sent his only begotten son to the cross, and most of his immediate disciples suffered extremely violent deaths because of their beliefs.
The Christian perspective is that the tragedies of this physical world, no matter how great or small, are as nothing compared to the stakes that are in play on the spiritual level. I am taking it a little out of context, but 2 Corinthians 4:17-18 says "For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."
If the soul really is eternal, and the fate of a soul is binary (not sure if I believe that, but most do), then suffering and dying in this finite world is a small price to pay. I say this not to minimize the horror of human suffering and death, but to maximize the significance of the eternal part of the equation--the part that we cannot see and know close to nothing about, much less how events in this world directly correlate to a net gain or loss in the next. It may--no, should--be impossible for us to actually feel in our gut that the devastation of the past week is anything but a horrific mistake that any responsible deity would have stopped at nothing to avoid. But I wonder if, should the Christians turn out to be right, we will look back in twenty million years and see that all the joys and sorrows of human history, much less a single event, were as significant as a single atom in the universe.
(If that argument doesn't float your boat, I have some other alternative ways of looking at it.)
I think the real question you should be asking me is, "Why did God create evil, sin, and the potential for infinite suffering in the afterlife?" Now that is one that flies way over my head!
If hundreds of thousands of people dying needless deaths in the space of a couple of hours isn't the right time to question the belief in an all-loving, all-powerful god, when the hell is the right time?
I'm not telling you that you shouldn't be asking questions. I'm just acknowledging that making my side of this argument forces me to cast a relatively uncompassionate light on events which I would much rather treat with reverence and sympathy.
And when I said "However, I don't like any tragedy being used as an argument against the existence of God" I didn't mean to accuse you or anyone else of somehow cynically taking advantage of the situation--it definitely came out that way, and I apologize for misspeaking. What I should have said was, "Even though this was very tragic, I feel compelled to argue for the existence of God."
I believe the purpose of the Bible is not to give us a full or even accurate understanding of God, but simply to help us understand what He wants us to do. I do not need to understand the actions of an infinite being in order to respond to the commands he gives me, just as a dog does not need to understand the actions of a person in order to be obedient.
The Bible is full of simple commands. Love your neighbor. Turn the other cheek. Act justly, love mercy, walk humbly with your God.
Before you say it, yes, it is amazing how many atrocities have been committed in Jesus' name, and how much hate and intolerance continues to pervade many (but by no means all!) parts of the Christian community today.
And I for one think that's a cop-out of Homeric proportions. You (assuming you're a Christian) claim to understand the actions of just such a being every time you espouse the tenets of your faith. God sent Jesus to redeem us, did he? How is that statement not claiming to understand his actions?
There are many, many aspects of Jesus, the doctrine of the Trinity, the mechanism by which one person can die for all mankind, which I cannot begin to fathom. However, the most famous verse in the Bible--John 3:16--is simple enough for a child to understand. I don't understand why Jesus had to die for us to be forgiven. However, that's not a prerequisite for me to have faith in the promises that result.
I don't claim to understand everything there is to understand about the Bible. I don't even claim that a full understanding of the Bible would give you a full, or even strictly accurate, understanding of God. I do, however, believe that applying even a limited understanding of the Bible is in the best interests of me, you, and the world, both for this life and to get to the next (presupposing its existence, of course).
In other words, I believe that in this life there are unsolvable questions. Though we may gain some enlightenment in the struggle to solve them, the ultimate goal for this life is not to have all the answers.
That said, my faith in the Bible is not based on nothing. If you ask me why I believe, I will tell you, and you can attack those arguments instead.
The "Problem Of Evil" is a notable argument, as cogent as it is concise, and the fact that two thousand years of Christian thought (Catholic and Protestant, at least) have failed to produce a single plausible theodicy, to my mind, strongly suggests that those thinkers ought to revisit their assumptions.
That may be. But there are also two thousand years of Christians who have grappled with this problem--many of whom I bet are people whose intellect you admire--and come to a satisfactory conclusion, armed with more or less the same observational data as you and I have.
Please disprove the existence of yellow flying rhinoceroses.
I fully recognize that the burden of proof lies on the believers. I also recognize that there are people to whom you will never be able to "disprove" any of their spiritual beliefs, much less the very existence of God. However, I believe that the PoE argument is not a good argument, in the same way that "Yellow flying rhinoceroses do not exist because yellow is ugly" is not a productive line of reasoning for proving or disproving the existence of such creatures.
The only way out of this conundrum without conceding that a god doesn't exist is by conceding that he is either not loving or not omnipotent.
Or by saying that your "bad" becomes a "good" when looked at with the proper perspective. Does a child consider a spanking "good" or "bad"? How about the parent?
Now multiply that times infinity (or at least a substantial finite number).
I hate to speak this way when we are referring to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. I don't mean to devalue their existence or deny the enormity of the tragedy. However, I don't like any tragedy being used as an argument against the existence of God.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you're not interested in quiet computing, but plenty of people are.
Thanks, that makes a lot more sense. Damn ambiguous English language :)
What's wrong with personalized training? I get more spam than almost anyone I know, and SpamBayes does a fantastic job for me.
What's most interesting to me about that configuration is the VIA EPIA. For $99 you get a 6.75" x 6.75" motherboard, a cool-running 800MHz processor, built-in networking/audio/video/USB (with TV-out and S/PDIF), two DIMM slots and a PCI slot. It's hard to build any computer around that and have it not end up a bargain! (For example, my personal mail server which totaled just over $200.)
Why is it so hard to make a decent-looking case that doesn't look like someone riced it up with stupid lights or clear plastic? I just ordered the parts to build a PC, and the hardest part was finding a case that didn't look like crap. I wasn't successful.
But if you do want to make a direct comparison, I'll bite. First, I bought the Mac Mini, in fact I waited in line on 1/22 at my local Apple store and was the first person to buy one there. It is definitely a great value for such a small, sexy device, and I can easily recommend it to anyone who needs a living room computer for basic computing needs.
But to be fair, the x86 offerings are nothing to sneeze at either. If you can deal with an 800MHz EPIA (more than adequate for SOHO server tasks), a combo with Silverstone LC09 ($150) + VIA EPIA 800 ($100 from idot.com) + 256MB PC133 ($50) + hard drive ($50) = $350, unless I am forgetting something. Or you can upgrade to a Celeron or Pentium 4 for an additional $60 plus the price of the CPU (unfortunately the cheapest P4 is a steep $125 on NewEgg, but you can get Celerons for as little as $60).
On the other side of the spectrum, I'm typing this on a Shuttle SN85G4 with an Athlon 64 and a WD Raptor hard drive. This rig is faster than any Mac except (arguably) the Power Mac, for a lot less money (it was $2000 a year ago).
There are a million reasons why none of the above are apples-to-apples comparisons to a Mac Mini, but, it seems clear that there are at least comparable values in the x86 world, at all points of the price/performance/size/style curve.
I hope you can return whatever ugly case you bought, because there are some pretty nice looking ones out there... you just have to look really really hard.
Cases:
Silverstone LC09 (Mini-ITX)
Ahanix D4
Soldam Alphia
Barebones:
Shuttle SB86i
Complete PC:
Hush
Most of these are not as cool looking as my Mac Mini, but then, you wouldn't be limited to 1.43GHz G4 and laptop hard drives.
There is an example right in the introduction.
Apparently you've never written software with significant amounts of UI before.
Actually it's more like the frontend stuff for Photoshop--or more precisely, the engine that drives parts of the frontend.
It's lossless (compressed/decompressed on the fly using Apple's Lossless codec).
See WASTE
The Internet tax ban is on discriminatory taxes--taxes that only apply to Internet-based sales--and also tax on use of the Internet itself. Use taxes already apply to almost all Internet-based interstate transactions, just as they have always applied to catalog/mail-order sales. There's nothing unconstitutional about them. (What is probably unconstitutional is the federal government collecting tax on interstate commerce, or perhaps states levying discriminatory taxes against interstate commerce--that is, state-level import/export taxes. I'm not an expert in the Constitution or in tax law.)
The reason you currently don't pay a state or local tax on transactions where the seller does not have a physical presence in your state, is not because the tax itself is unconstitutional, but because it's an undue burden on the seller to have to figure out the intensely complicated state and local tax rates for everyone in the country. At least, this was the case almost 40 years ago when the US Supreme Court decided this (google for National Bella Hess, Inc. v. Dept. of Revenue of Illinois (1967)). So you actually do owe tax for every purchase, Internet or otherwise (unless you live in a state without sales/use tax)--it's just not legal for the state to require the seller to collect the tax, and it's not practical for the state to come after you.
Plenty of people are trying to change this sorry state of affairs, because as you say, the Internet wasn't around when the rules were made. The main approach seems to be to simplify the state and local sales tax codes across the country, so it would no longer be an undue burden on retailers to calculate the appropriate tax, and Bella Hess could be overturned. 1, 2, 3.
You had me all the way up to "or even superior". :)
There's nothing significant whitespace would get you, either, except perhaps terseness.
Yeah, if only Python had anonymous functions...
I use a virtual private server, specifically so I can install whatever software I want. And only $20/month for unlimited domains.
The creator of Rails uses Mac OS X.
"That part" was the whole point. You can create abstractions that embody the try/finally (or many other kinds of flow control logic), which is not possible (or at least, not convenient) in languages that do not have anonymous functions.
Imagine if, for example, Python didn't come with a built-in language construct for list comprehensions. You couldn't easily add a "list comprehension" function, whereas it'd be very easy in Ruby (and several other languages).
def make_adder(k) lambda {|x| k+x}; end
Whoa, whoa. Once again, I don't think this line of investigation will lead anyone to believe in the authenticitiy and reliability of the Bible. It was the ancestor post that started this discussion by saying the tsunami disaster disproves the existence of an all-loving all-powerful god as described in the Judeo-Christian-Islam ethos. In other words, I am not attempting to convince you there is an all-powerful all-loving God, but rather, that human suffering does not preclude the existence of that God.
As a result, my job is only to introduce possible scenarios and constraints which can reconcile tsunamis and ALAP God, whereas your job is to show these scenarios impossible. Right?
I don't consider intellect to be a generic attribute.
Then I retract the comment. I certainly don't expect you to relate to Christians who are famous for their theology/philosophy.
Satisfactory to whom? To themselves, perhaps; our standards of intellectual rigour always slip when it comes to our most cherished beliefs.
I won't deny that I argue from my bias, or that Christian thinkers look hard for answers that correlate with scripture (though I don't believe most do so to the point of intellectual blindness or dishonesty). On the other hand, perhaps your own bias is what keeps you from accepting a perfectly reasonable conclusion.
If a god is willing to let millions of Christians suffer and die, then he doesn't love them.
No Christian believes that their God is not willing to let his people suffer and die. After all, we are talking about a deity who sent his only begotten son to the cross, and most of his immediate disciples suffered extremely violent deaths because of their beliefs.
The Christian perspective is that the tragedies of this physical world, no matter how great or small, are as nothing compared to the stakes that are in play on the spiritual level. I am taking it a little out of context, but 2 Corinthians 4:17-18 says "For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen. For what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal."
If the soul really is eternal, and the fate of a soul is binary (not sure if I believe that, but most do), then suffering and dying in this finite world is a small price to pay. I say this not to minimize the horror of human suffering and death, but to maximize the significance of the eternal part of the equation--the part that we cannot see and know close to nothing about, much less how events in this world directly correlate to a net gain or loss in the next. It may--no, should--be impossible for us to actually feel in our gut that the devastation of the past week is anything but a horrific mistake that any responsible deity would have stopped at nothing to avoid. But I wonder if, should the Christians turn out to be right, we will look back in twenty million years and see that all the joys and sorrows of human history, much less a single event, were as significant as a single atom in the universe.
(If that argument doesn't float your boat, I have some other alternative ways of looking at it.)
I think the real question you should be asking me is, "Why did God create evil, sin, and the potential for infinite suffering in the afterlife?" Now that is one that flies way over my head!
If hundreds of thousands of people dying needless deaths in the space of a couple of hours isn't the right time to question the belief in an all-loving, all-powerful god, when the hell is the right time?
I'm not telling you that you shouldn't be asking questions. I'm just acknowledging that making my side of this argument forces me to cast a relatively uncompassionate light on events which I would much rather treat with reverence and sympathy.
And when I said "However, I don't like any tragedy being used as an argument against the existence of God" I didn't mean to accuse you or anyone else of somehow cynically taking advantage of the situation--it definitely came out that way, and I apologize for misspeaking. What I should have said was, "Even though this was very tragic, I feel compelled to argue for the existence of God."
The Bible is full of simple commands. Love your neighbor. Turn the other cheek. Act justly, love mercy, walk humbly with your God.
Before you say it, yes, it is amazing how many atrocities have been committed in Jesus' name, and how much hate and intolerance continues to pervade many (but by no means all!) parts of the Christian community today.
There are many, many aspects of Jesus, the doctrine of the Trinity, the mechanism by which one person can die for all mankind, which I cannot begin to fathom. However, the most famous verse in the Bible--John 3:16--is simple enough for a child to understand. I don't understand why Jesus had to die for us to be forgiven. However, that's not a prerequisite for me to have faith in the promises that result.
I don't claim to understand everything there is to understand about the Bible. I don't even claim that a full understanding of the Bible would give you a full, or even strictly accurate, understanding of God. I do, however, believe that applying even a limited understanding of the Bible is in the best interests of me, you, and the world, both for this life and to get to the next (presupposing its existence, of course).
In other words, I believe that in this life there are unsolvable questions. Though we may gain some enlightenment in the struggle to solve them, the ultimate goal for this life is not to have all the answers.
That said, my faith in the Bible is not based on nothing. If you ask me why I believe, I will tell you, and you can attack those arguments instead.
The "Problem Of Evil" is a notable argument, as cogent as it is concise, and the fact that two thousand years of Christian thought (Catholic and Protestant, at least) have failed to produce a single plausible theodicy, to my mind, strongly suggests that those thinkers ought to revisit their assumptions.
That may be. But there are also two thousand years of Christians who have grappled with this problem--many of whom I bet are people whose intellect you admire--and come to a satisfactory conclusion, armed with more or less the same observational data as you and I have.
I fully recognize that the burden of proof lies on the believers. I also recognize that there are people to whom you will never be able to "disprove" any of their spiritual beliefs, much less the very existence of God. However, I believe that the PoE argument is not a good argument, in the same way that "Yellow flying rhinoceroses do not exist because yellow is ugly" is not a productive line of reasoning for proving or disproving the existence of such creatures.
The only way out of this conundrum without conceding that a god doesn't exist is by conceding that he is either not loving or not omnipotent.
Or by saying that your "bad" becomes a "good" when looked at with the proper perspective. Does a child consider a spanking "good" or "bad"? How about the parent?
Now multiply that times infinity (or at least a substantial finite number).
I hate to speak this way when we are referring to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. I don't mean to devalue their existence or deny the enormity of the tragedy. However, I don't like any tragedy being used as an argument against the existence of God.