deliberately misunderstanding the meaning of "theory" in the context of science and equating it with an unproven hypothesis.
Oh I don't misunderstand the difference. However, most public schools do, and they teach a theory as if it were a law (such as the laws of thermodynamics or the laws of gravity). I think a lot of people misinterpret trying to bring the theory of evolution down to a "theory" as trying to convert it into a hypothetis. This just isn't the desired intent.
don't believe in evolution, but I still acknowledge that it explains the observed facts and has made falsifiable predictions that were, in turn, shown to be correct
How's this:
I don't believe in evolution, but I still acknowledge that it makes an attempt to explain the observed facts and has made predictions that were, in turn, shown to be correct by those who believe the theory of evolution is in fact falsible.
Unfortunately, most scientists today view evolution as infalsible. The excuse is to simply "keep digging". I believe there is more than enough information to suggest that we move on and find some other scientific explanations.
since 'the theory of evolution' falls under the Scientific definition of theory...
It is a theory, but it is taught in the classroom as law. Look at the recent judicial ruling forcing Georgia to remove stickers from text books that said, "This book contains... evolution... just a theory.". If you're going to call it a theory, one ought to teach it as such. They don't.
There is an excellent book that you might find interesting on the subject. I don't believe the author was a Christian either, although I could be wrong. At the very least, he doesn't state his beliefs anywhere I've seen - but then again I'm not completely finished with the book yet. It's called Darwin's Black Box and it poses a biochemical challenge to evolution by a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University. Regardless of which side of the fence one might sit on, this is a great book.
You're right. No true Christian believes in evolution, because by your definition of Christianity, he couldn't believe in evolution.
But you're confusing cause and effect. People don't (usually) become Christians and then learn that rejecting evolution needs to be part of their faith. Well, some do - primarily the ones who just never thought the subject was important enough to think about (at which point they start thinking about it and draw a conclusion). Most people become Christians after realizing there's something terribly wrong with the way they've been living, and at least in my case that involved my burping a lot of science up in high school. There was a problem before I ever suspected there might be a solution - I spent quite a bit of time, in fact, simply believing "nothing". It starts with "faith", that is true - but nowhere does believing the Bible ever include intellectual suicide.
When I say lacking a standard testing interface, I'm not referring to how to test - that's already well taken care of. I'm referring to whatever protocol or execution standard will be used to actually communicate with the filters. You can create a "spam jig", but then getting everyone to buy into your own standard will likely leave you coding up much of it (which is where error usually occurs). Being that this is the Internet, we like to do everything based on RFC and standards. When there comes a standard way for MTAs to talk to MFAs (Mail Filter Agents), this framework will likely be adopted for testing as well.
Hey I'm just telling it like it is. There are social converts in any religion - not just Christianity. Just like there are plenty of people in everyday life who implement Java because it's popular. Not trying to judge anyone, but you're going to run into this kind of thing no matter what you believe.
My point is that there are people who are Christians out of strong conviction, and part of that conviction may have solid factual foundations.
A great many Christians are also evolutionists. There is no dichotomy.
I suspect you are confusing social Christians with real Christianity. There are plenty of people who label themself as a Christian simply because they grew up in a Christian household or because they go to church on Easter and Christmas. Most people like this haven't really ever read the Bible from cover to cover, don't live what would be considered a Christian lifestyle, and in all likelihood believe the same as anyone who's not a Christian. It's pretty easy to water down the definition of Christianity if you include the social converts. On the other hand, if you're talking about Christians in the sense of those who have convictions to follow after the God of the Bible, live right, pray daily, and seek to have a relationship with their maker, then you're very lucky if you find a small percentage of these who accept what they're told in school about evolution.
On the other side of things, there are plenty of people who are not Christians by any sense of the word (they do not label themselves as such, and may even be atheists) who don't swallow evolution. They likely don't believe in creationism either, but they've found just as many flaws in the theory and refuse to accept it. So you're right, in a sense - there is no dichotomy - people from all walks of life have rejected the theory of evolution. Being Christian is not a prerequisite.
What advice do you have as a developer of this program to:
* Help my users send legitimate messages (either by education (specifically) or by programming techniques)
* Help Spam Filtering Software check the messages my program sends out for possible abuse
* Be a part of the solution to sending legitimate messages to many people, rather than perhaps be part of the problem.
I had written up an answer to this one, but it turned out not to appear in the interview questions, so it got bitcanned. I believe the summary was to incorporate functionality such as listid, to help a filter identify that the message was coming from a mailing list. This way, whether it's spam or ham, the filter can better identify it.
Perhaps other areas that might make it very sysadmin-friendly in terms of management would be putting in filter interfaces to allow one to check outgoing messages to the list, and potentially flag suspect messages for additional approval.
As far as making people send good messages, there's not much hope for you. People are going to abuse your software no matter how hard you try and educate them. That's part of free software - giving spammers the freedom to use it too. Hopefully incorporating as many list identification features by default will at least help the dimmer of the bunch make their spam more available.
However, I've had unacceptably high false-positive rates. Saying that you only get one spam a day is fine--I can deal with that. Are you sure that no legitimate e-mail is being tagged though?
After a few months of learning, DSPAM has gotten pretty good about not giving me very many false positives. I'd say my FP rate is about the same as my FN rate, perhaps one per month. DSPAM has some integrated false-positive protection coding called "statistical sedation" which cuts off after you it learns enough messages. This waters down filtering to some degree, but it also avoids a large number of FPs.
Another function I use is the confidence-sort in my quarantine. My email is very eclectic, being that I'm involved in a lot of projects, and so I've had my share of false positives during training. By sorting on confidence, any likely candidates for FPs rise to the very top of my quarantine list around 49%-55%. This makes the daily scan through the bucket much faster.
eMule/aMule/etc. are much cooler because you can easily mod them to leech without having to give anything back to the community. As I understand it, this is why the FSF also wants to slam eDonkey, as it's hurting open source.
Should Intel accept AMD's challenge, the duel would take place at a public venue to be announced in the coming weeks
Place the chips in an unmarked bag and drop them in the trash on the corner of 2nd and 4th. We'll let you know when our neutral, third-party testing lab is finished with them and post their results.
I suppose some arears of science are experiencing that decline, but look at our armed forces. We're creating lasers to shoot projectiles out of the air, even in close proximity. We've created a microwave gun attached to a truck. I consider these to be both science and technology.
I agree, and not trying to start a flame war, it's really only the less credible portions of science that are deteriorating - and it's not because of the "religious right", but rather just bad science. There are plenty of atheists who think evolution is also a far fetched and less than credible theory. Books have been written on the topic. Scientists, professors at prestigious colleges, and plenty of straight thinking individuals take issue with it. It seems as though the only people who are complaining are the ones who want to blame everything on religion rather than simply fess up to bad science.
"Scientists, like everybody else, base most of their opinions on the word of other people. Of the great majority who accept Darwinism, most (though not all) do so based on authority. Also, and unfortunately, too often criticisms have been dismissed by the scientific community for fear of giving ammunition to creationists. It is ironic that in the name of protecting science, trenchant scientific criticism of natural selection has been brushed aside."
- Michael Behe, Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University
Bottom line, I think, is that if you can't establish the science behind it, society's not going to be better off by trying to pass [whatever it is] off as truth.
I miss the days when i could play C64, Atari, Coleco and Intellivision until i had square eyes. Not a care in the world, as i was in the public school system.
Many of those kids, now grown adults, are still in the public school system.
Part of the cost is caused by the need to take out insurance in case of a malpractice lawsuit, and to carry out usability and safety tests.
I would love to see a malpractice suit over a defective floppy disk. As far as usability and safety go - it's a floppy disk... don't stick it in your ear, and if it's broke then toss it and use another one. If they weren't $500 a piece, your doc might be able to afford an entire box, which would render those usability tests obsolete;)
I've got some friends in the medical industry, and it's seriously bloated financially - this is probably the same hardware that costs $100,000, but without the label on it. One company I know of who builds X-Ray machines charges $500 for a "specially formatted" floppy disk to be used with their equipment. A floppy disk!! You can make your own by simply using 'dd', but doctors are too dumb to know this. It's not just the patients who get screwed, paying $8 for an asprin - it's the entire industry. This is cool, one definite way to say "shove it up uranus", and have almost identical equipment as you would have paid otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
deliberately misunderstanding the meaning of "theory" in the context of science and equating it with an unproven hypothesis.
Oh I don't misunderstand the difference. However, most public schools do, and they teach a theory as if it were a law (such as the laws of thermodynamics or the laws of gravity). I think a lot of people misinterpret trying to bring the theory of evolution down to a "theory" as trying to convert it into a hypothetis. This just isn't the desired intent.
don't believe in evolution, but I still acknowledge that it explains the observed facts and has made falsifiable predictions that were, in turn, shown to be correct
How's this:
I don't believe in evolution, but I still acknowledge that it makes an attempt to explain the observed facts and has made predictions that were, in turn, shown to be correct by those who believe the theory of evolution is in fact falsible.
Unfortunately, most scientists today view evolution as infalsible. The excuse is to simply "keep digging". I believe there is more than enough information to suggest that we move on and find some other scientific explanations.
since 'the theory of evolution' falls under the Scientific definition of theory...
It is a theory, but it is taught in the classroom as law. Look at the recent judicial ruling forcing Georgia to remove stickers from text books that said, "This book contains... evolution... just a theory.". If you're going to call it a theory, one ought to teach it as such. They don't.
There is an excellent book that you might find interesting on the subject. I don't believe the author was a Christian either, although I could be wrong. At the very least, he doesn't state his beliefs anywhere I've seen - but then again I'm not completely finished with the book yet. It's called Darwin's Black Box and it poses a biochemical challenge to evolution by a professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University. Regardless of which side of the fence one might sit on, this is a great book.
Pardon, what was the question though? I haven't seen a re-post, and the link is broken.
You're right. No true Christian believes in evolution, because by your definition of Christianity, he couldn't believe in evolution.
But you're confusing cause and effect. People don't (usually) become Christians and then learn that rejecting evolution needs to be part of their faith. Well, some do - primarily the ones who just never thought the subject was important enough to think about (at which point they start thinking about it and draw a conclusion). Most people become Christians after realizing there's something terribly wrong with the way they've been living, and at least in my case that involved my burping a lot of science up in high school. There was a problem before I ever suspected there might be a solution - I spent quite a bit of time, in fact, simply believing "nothing". It starts with "faith", that is true - but nowhere does believing the Bible ever include intellectual suicide.
When I say lacking a standard testing interface, I'm not referring to how to test - that's already well taken care of. I'm referring to whatever protocol or execution standard will be used to actually communicate with the filters. You can create a "spam jig", but then getting everyone to buy into your own standard will likely leave you coding up much of it (which is where error usually occurs). Being that this is the Internet, we like to do everything based on RFC and standards. When there comes a standard way for MTAs to talk to MFAs (Mail Filter Agents), this framework will likely be adopted for testing as well.
Hey I'm just telling it like it is. There are social converts in any religion - not just Christianity. Just like there are plenty of people in everyday life who implement Java because it's popular. Not trying to judge anyone, but you're going to run into this kind of thing no matter what you believe.
My point is that there are people who are Christians out of strong conviction, and part of that conviction may have solid factual foundations.
A great many Christians are also evolutionists. There is no dichotomy.
I suspect you are confusing social Christians with real Christianity. There are plenty of people who label themself as a Christian simply because they grew up in a Christian household or because they go to church on Easter and Christmas. Most people like this haven't really ever read the Bible from cover to cover, don't live what would be considered a Christian lifestyle, and in all likelihood believe the same as anyone who's not a Christian. It's pretty easy to water down the definition of Christianity if you include the social converts. On the other hand, if you're talking about Christians in the sense of those who have convictions to follow after the God of the Bible, live right, pray daily, and seek to have a relationship with their maker, then you're very lucky if you find a small percentage of these who accept what they're told in school about evolution.
On the other side of things, there are plenty of people who are not Christians by any sense of the word (they do not label themselves as such, and may even be atheists) who don't swallow evolution. They likely don't believe in creationism either, but they've found just as many flaws in the theory and refuse to accept it. So you're right, in a sense - there is no dichotomy - people from all walks of life have rejected the theory of evolution. Being Christian is not a prerequisite.
What advice do you have as a developer of this program to: * Help my users send legitimate messages (either by education (specifically) or by programming techniques) * Help Spam Filtering Software check the messages my program sends out for possible abuse * Be a part of the solution to sending legitimate messages to many people, rather than perhaps be part of the problem.
I had written up an answer to this one, but it turned out not to appear in the interview questions, so it got bitcanned. I believe the summary was to incorporate functionality such as listid, to help a filter identify that the message was coming from a mailing list. This way, whether it's spam or ham, the filter can better identify it.
Perhaps other areas that might make it very sysadmin-friendly in terms of management would be putting in filter interfaces to allow one to check outgoing messages to the list, and potentially flag suspect messages for additional approval.
As far as making people send good messages, there's not much hope for you. People are going to abuse your software no matter how hard you try and educate them. That's part of free software - giving spammers the freedom to use it too. Hopefully incorporating as many list identification features by default will at least help the dimmer of the bunch make their spam more available.
However, I've had unacceptably high false-positive rates. Saying that you only get one spam a day is fine--I can deal with that. Are you sure that no legitimate e-mail is being tagged though?
After a few months of learning, DSPAM has gotten pretty good about not giving me very many false positives. I'd say my FP rate is about the same as my FN rate, perhaps one per month. DSPAM has some integrated false-positive protection coding called "statistical sedation" which cuts off after you it learns enough messages. This waters down filtering to some degree, but it also avoids a large number of FPs.
Another function I use is the confidence-sort in my quarantine. My email is very eclectic, being that I'm involved in a lot of projects, and so I've had my share of false positives during training. By sorting on confidence, any likely candidates for FPs rise to the very top of my quarantine list around 49%-55%. This makes the daily scan through the bucket much faster.
eMule/aMule/etc. are much cooler because you can easily mod them to leech without having to give anything back to the community. As I understand it, this is why the FSF also wants to slam eDonkey, as it's hurting open source.
I'm blind, you insensitive clod!
I just created my account. I'm cbergeron.
I'm bgates$$. Please feel free to add me to your list.
Stay tuned to Google tomorrow for details.
Er, is that one http://tomorrow.google.com/ ?
Computer Science degrees are not as attractive for college students anymore
College students have surprisingly decided they prefer drunken parties and naked women more...especially if the two are combined.
... global warming on the rise again.
Should Intel accept AMD's challenge, the duel would take place at a public venue to be announced in the coming weeks
Place the chips in an unmarked bag and drop them in the trash on the corner of 2nd and 4th. We'll let you know when our neutral, third-party testing lab is finished with them and post their results.
I suppose some arears of science are experiencing that decline, but look at our armed forces. We're creating lasers to shoot projectiles out of the air, even in close proximity. We've created a microwave gun attached to a truck. I consider these to be both science and technology.
I agree, and not trying to start a flame war, it's really only the less credible portions of science that are deteriorating - and it's not because of the "religious right", but rather just bad science. There are plenty of atheists who think evolution is also a far fetched and less than credible theory. Books have been written on the topic. Scientists, professors at prestigious colleges, and plenty of straight thinking individuals take issue with it. It seems as though the only people who are complaining are the ones who want to blame everything on religion rather than simply fess up to bad science.
"Scientists, like everybody else, base most of their opinions on the word of other people. Of the great majority who accept Darwinism, most (though not all) do so based on authority. Also, and unfortunately, too often criticisms have been dismissed by the scientific community for fear of giving ammunition to creationists. It is ironic that in the name of protecting science, trenchant scientific criticism of natural selection has been brushed aside."
- Michael Behe, Professor of Biochemistry at Lehigh University
Bottom line, I think, is that if you can't establish the science behind it, society's not going to be better off by trying to pass [whatever it is] off as truth.
Is open source for you? discusses shortcomings of open source software and cases when it's not recommended
That would be the chapter about running more inferior, costly solutions?
I miss the days when i could play C64, Atari, Coleco and Intellivision until i had square eyes. Not a care in the world, as i was in the public school system.
Many of those kids, now grown adults, are still in the public school system.
This is not about software, this is about trademarks
Ah. then we need a third category: Free as in Trademarks.
Part of the cost is caused by the need to take out insurance in case of a malpractice lawsuit, and to carry out usability and safety tests.
;)
I would love to see a malpractice suit over a defective floppy disk. As far as usability and safety go - it's a floppy disk... don't stick it in your ear, and if it's broke then toss it and use another one. If they weren't $500 a piece, your doc might be able to afford an entire box, which would render those usability tests obsolete
Trademark Requirements:
...
1. Does it run Linux?
2.
3. Profit?
Prices range from $200 to $5k for companies with over a million bucks in revenue.
So I guess that's free as in 'freedom' then?
I've got some friends in the medical industry, and it's seriously bloated financially - this is probably the same hardware that costs $100,000, but without the label on it. One company I know of who builds X-Ray machines charges $500 for a "specially formatted" floppy disk to be used with their equipment. A floppy disk!! You can make your own by simply using 'dd', but doctors are too dumb to know this. It's not just the patients who get screwed, paying $8 for an asprin - it's the entire industry. This is cool, one definite way to say "shove it up uranus", and have almost identical equipment as you would have paid otherwise.