The Christian tradition is ambiguous on free will. Classical Catholic and Protestant thought often rejected it. Augustine, Calvin and Luther all considered free will largely an illusion. However other Catholic thought, as well as the pietistic side of Protestant thought considered free will essential for responsibility. For the last few centuries free will has tended to dominate. I believe this is because at least on the Protestant side evangelicalism has been dominant, and it was largely influence by John Wesley and other thinkers who emphasized free will.
Note that determinism is hardly a new idea. Theology determinism goes back quite early. But scientific determinism has been common since Newton. It is not necessary to know the physiology of the brain to realize that in principle there is probably a determinist explanation. Jonathan Edwards wrote a book in the 18th Cent that largely rejected free will. While he was a theologian and is part of the anti-free will tradition, I believe his writing is inflluenced by scientific determinism as well.
The question is whether it's possible to give a coherent account of human responsibility when at least some level of determinism is present. I believe so, though this probably isn't the place to do it. Indeed I think the dominant free will oriented explanations have led us into trouble. Most people now believe that responsibility can only exist when people make decisions that can't be explained. I don't think that made sense even in the 18th Cent, but if we don't come up with an alternative now, we're likely to end up with some pretty unpleasant consequences, as suggested in this posting.
You suggest that free will was dreamed up to save God from responsibility. In modern discussions of religion, God's responsibiliity for evil is a significant issue. As far as I can tell, this is fairly recent. That problem wasn't sufficiently bothersome in the formative period to be the foundation of free will. Rather, free will is a pretty obvious idea in any naive concept of psychololgy. Indeed in Christian history is was generally determinism that had to explain itself. It came from fairly specific ideas of sin and redemption, which I would say have always been considered controversial.
If the legal system remains unchanged, then I agree that these things may not matter. But the concern is that it may not remain unchanged.
>despite all its short-comings, win32 had pre-emptive multithreading and protected memory for all of eight years (1993 vs 2001)
>before Apple got out a consumer OS with the same.
Win32 is an API, not an OS. Protected memory is an attribute of the OS, not the API. If we're talking about significant consumer implementations, the first serious implementation of win32 would be Windows 95. (Earlier ones were NT 3.51 and Win32s in Windows 3.1.) That's 1995.
The Mac equivalent to the win32 API would be Carbon. I agree that the first real protected mode implementation was 2001, with OS X, though I'm not convinced that anything before 10.2 was commercially significant. That's in 2002.
But that's still a long gap. While some had a different experience, during that gap I remember that every time my Mac staff wanted to show me something, their systems hung. I told them to come see me again when they had a real OS. Of course now they do, and I prefer it to XP/Vista.
With this license agreement, Novell has a license to put MS patented technology into their Linux. Is it safe to permit Novell engineers to submit code to common Linux repositories? It seems to me that they would need to certify that none of their code contains any of the MS IP that they now have access to. Unless MS is willing to identify which portions of SuSE are covered by their patents, this could be difficult.
The comments here seem to be individual experience. While I don't know of any systematic surveys, you can do better than this by reading the Apple discussion boards regularly. Of course every product will have failures. But it seems clear that the Macbook Pro had more than usual. The primary issues were heating and various noises. It also seems that those problems have been fixed (for about a month), by a combination of things: replacing bad inverters, an update to the firmware to change fan behavior, and a new motherboard. The fixes were done in that order. The most recent is the motherboard replacement. Since that was done I haven't seen signs that the MPB has an abnormal level of failures.
As far as I know, the iMac and Mini have not had abnormal failures.
I haven't been following the Macbook discussions, so I'm not going to summarize the situation there. There is at least one worrisome problem (staining of the white plastic), and there may be others.
The G3 iBooks had several endemic problems, although not at the level of the initial Macbook Pro problems. The G4 iBooks seem to have been fine.
I'm not in a position to comment how this experience compares to PC architecture.
There seems to be a lot of FUD in this discussion. At least in New Jersey, at middle and secondary level, you can become "highly qualified" by
* holding a BA
* having been certified to teach with no requirements waived
* meeting any of a whole list of qualifications, one of which is having an undergraduate major (or graduate degree) in the area you're teaching
For veteran teachers there is an alternative approach, that involves getting points from various things, including college work in the subject area, good evaluations, serving on standards commiittees, and work with content area specialists. It does not require getting a masters, and it seems skewed to content rather than education theory. Furthermore, at least in NJ, the school is not permitted to fire people who haven't met the standards yet.
At a number of institutions (including mine) there are joint majors, education and some substantive area. In mine, math and physics both have programs with the education school. I believe you get a BA in math or physics and a masters in education, in 5 years. There may well be other fields as well -- I was investigating opportunities for a high school student who was interested in math and physics. I talked with a faculty member in math: the department considers it a serious program; graduates have as much math as a pure math major.
My problem with global warming advocates isn't so much on bad science (although I think it's there). Rather, the advocacy seems to be associated with a politics that doesn't look very useful.
Perhaps we should start concentrating on identifying areas that are likely to be damaged and develping plans to help them. It doesn't actually matter that much whether it's human effects or sunspots causing it, unless we can plausibly stop the changes in time to protect from the negative consequences. But no one I've seen has a plausiblel plan to do that. Kyoto seems like an incredible waste of resources which should be going into preparing the areas that are going to be affected.
You'd need to read the actual scientific paper to judge this. There's a subtle statistical problem: statistical tests assume that you're testing a single, fixed alternative. Outcomes are commonly considered statistically significantly when the test shows only a.05 chance of getting the same result by chance. That's OK when you're testing a single, predefined conclusion. But when there are lots of variables in the study, you can normally find after the fact some combination of criteria that produce a good outcome. Indeed if they were independent, 1 out of 20 criteria would come out positive at the.05 significance level. So I'm very sceptical of these "the main test didn't pan out, but the following odd thing showed a result."
I should note that this issue is not limited to prayer studies. Many studies in economics and other social sciences are subject to the same criticism. You can't try 20 different models, find one that fits, and then claim that you have a result at the.05 significance level. You'd expect that by chance. It's what.05 significance means. (Again, this assumes independence, which is not typically true, but the basic criticism is still valid.)
Of course it's perfectly valid to find something interesting and then do a second test with that as the main hypothesis. I suspect that if we look at the paper, we'll find that the authors recommend further study of the things that turned out positive.
I work at a University, so we may not be close to your environment to matter. But I would distinguish between production and research systems. I wouldn't give anyone but professional sysadmins anything close to root on systems like mail servers or multiuser systems. But unless you're working with sensitive data, on research systems things are more flexible. A lot depends upon the sophistication of the people involved as well as the actual environment. I'd be more inclined to give out root on a machine with one or two users and I'd be more inclined to give it to somewhat who had sysadmin experience. On a machine shared by a small research group, if I could find one person with reasonable experience, I might try to coopt him into the sysadmin group. That way there's somebody near the users who can solve their problems.
These days security is an issue. But with a compute cluster I'll bet I could come up with a setup where moderate errors wouldn't compromise the rest of the network. A compute cluster is easier because people won't be running browsers on it or reading their email there. That eliminates most of the user-caused problems. So at that point a tight firewall may be enough. On a small research machine used by one research project you're not really trying to protect users from each other. So many of the traditional concerns about protection don't apply.
I hope this posting is a troll, and not a posting by an actual Christian. The fact that there are serious disagreements among Christians is bad enough, without making a point of it in a context like this. Who needs atheists, when Christians can be relied on to do ourselves in.
The discussion here seems to presume that ID is unfalsifiable. Biology isn't my area, but the few articles I've read on ID don't seem consistent with that. I'm assuming that ID in the current context is essentially based on "irreducible complexity." I admit that it's a bit vague, but there are plenty of ideas in science that started out vague and gained precision over time. I don't think this one is going to last long enough for that to happen. No one experiment can refute it, because the proponents can keep proposing new examples of irreducibly complex things. But my impression is that biologists have shown plausible paths for several of the most publicized examples of irreducibly complex structures. It shouldn't take very many cases like that to effectively knock down the idea. Of course its proponents may not (almost certainly won't) accept that, but that's a different problem.
In sum, my position at the moment is that ID is at least a scientific hypothesis, and that currently there's at least moderately convincing evidence against it.
Since some posters have been challenging "moderate" Christians to say something, I will note that I'm a Christian, and as far as I can tell (not being a specialist in the field) evolution is a fairly well established model. I teach Sunday School (7th and 8th grade). I'm thinking of covering questions of origins there. If I do, it will probably end up more a science education project than theology -- I'm not that impressed with what my students seem to have learned in areas I would have hoped the schools would cover. For Sunday School that includes primarily ancient history and English (the ability to read a text and get some idea of what the author was doing).
In some of the discussions I'm hearing (not just here, but among faculty), I think scientists are being too defensive. I understand why. But kids need to learn how to assess scientific and pseudo-scientific arguments. I think it would make sense to explain irreducible complexity, talk about the question of how you'd test it, and look at some of the arguments against it. If we try to rule discussions like this out of court, we're going to produce kids who think evolution can't stand up to challenge. There are enough politically popular things we're teaching that actually can't stand investigation that people who don't take time to look at the science could quite reasonably lump evolution in with them.
There's a reasonable chance that it should be translated "the women should not chatter in church", i.e. that it's addressing a specific problem. Since Paul acknowledges women as fellow Christian leaders, and says what they should wear when addressing the congregation, the traditional interpretation seems hard to take.
In the end you're going to have to ask vendors (or advocates for free solutions) to give you examples of configurations. There are certainly candidates. I believe Sun's JES is used by some large ISPs. Novell has a couple of products that might be interesting. Mirapoint makes appliances which are very much worth looking at.
I'm sure you know what to ask these folks: give us examples of configurations that actually are used in large-scale installations.
What I liked about Communigate is that their multisystem setups looked more symmetrical than some of the alternatives. The main reason I didn't look at them was that I was looking to do mail and calendaring and at the time they didn't have calendaring. They do now.
Also look at what other service you're going to need: spam protection, support for Blackberry and other mobile access. Vendors ought to be able to tell you how to integrate these support services.
This report was bogus. They reported a threading problem in Apache 1.3, which isn't threaded. I tried duplicating the results, and found even the raw data reported suspicious.
Some comment has been made about Jones' religion, which appears to be Jehovah's Witness. As moderator of soc.religion.christian I try to keep informed on the major Christian and almost-Christian groups. However I will warn you that I haven't had a lot of personal contact with JW's.
I wouldn't quite characterize the JW beliefs as "loopy". Their most serious theological problem is rejecting the Trinity, but that's a judgement reasonable people can disagree about. It's not the sort of science fiction that you'll see in theology that I *would* characterize as loopy. I'd say it's just wrong.
The most serious objections are to the authority claimed by their central organization, and the way it has somes been exercized, e.g. in prohibiting transfusions and deemphasizing higher education, as well as discipline that is considered excessively harsh by many other Christians.
But none of this is relevant to the credibility of individual JWs in matters such as legal commentary. Their overall ethics, including matters such as proper handling of the truth, are as far as I can tell the usual ones. And as a moderately high-pressure sect, their members are probably more likely than the average actually to follow the official ethics. Obviously stereotypes are misleading -- you need to judge individuals. But to the extent that the JWs create a stereotype in my mind, it is not one that would discredit the credibility of Groklaw. I wouldn't necessarily depend upon a JW's judgements on how to live my life, but I find nothing improbable about a JW being an honest and competent paralegal.
I think this actuallly makes sense. MS understands the reality that they're not going to get people in 3rd world countries to pay anything like the US price. So they're coming up with an edition that will get them as much money as they can realistically expect. It will be preinstalled, just as most copies are preinstalled here. So there's not really an issue of convincing people to install it.
It won't actually matter to them if people overwrite it with an illicit copy of the real thing, since they've gotten as much money by getting this preinstalled as they can reasonably expect. (In fact they might actually be better off if everyone replaces it with the real thing - there's no point having your whole user population mad at you for being forced to use a crippled product.)
The only question I see is whether they wouldn't be better off just to give a 95% discount on the normal product. I assume this would get them in trouble with the people who they think might actually pay for the real thing.
In all of this discussion I still haven't seen a coherent account of how OS X actually works. Let me try:
1) Someone said that root isn't active by default. That's sort of true. Root obviously exists. Anyone who is in the group admin can do "sudo" to do a specific command as root. They have to type their password to use sudo. However they can't login as root or su to root, because root doesn't have a password. If you want to be able to su to root, you give root a password by "sudo passwd root" or something similar. That command is not documented by Apple. They intend that users who want to do something as root will use sudo. "sudo bash" would appear to be functionally equivalent to "su", so assigning a password to root doesn't seem necessary, and is probably not best practice.
2) There has been a lot of discussion about creating files in/Library/StartupItems. On a system that was installed from scratch a couple of months ago with the most recent OS,/Library/StartupItems is protected 755 root:wheel. On an older system it is protected 775 root:wheel. But you need to realize that wheel is *not* the admin group. My normal uid, which is an administrator, is not in wheel. The admin group is admin.
Apple has done their best to make sure that you must type the password of an administrator before doing anything one would think of as administrator actions. Frankly I think there are enough corners in any complex OS to get unwary users to install Trojans. But some of the info in this thread has been wrong.
The Rutgers central systems are in the process of moving antivirus processing from "appliances" made by a major AV vendor to our own Linux systems using Amavis. Amavis is smart enough not to send notifications to users in response to Sobig. The appliances do not appear to have an option to disable this. The move isn't quite finished, but the high-volume systems should now be on Amavis. That change is quite recent.
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The Christian tradition is ambiguous on free will. Classical Catholic and Protestant thought often rejected it. Augustine, Calvin and Luther all considered free will largely an illusion. However other Catholic thought, as well as the pietistic side of Protestant thought considered free will essential for responsibility. For the last few centuries free will has tended to dominate. I believe this is because at least on the Protestant side evangelicalism has been dominant, and it was largely influence by John Wesley and other thinkers who emphasized free will.
Note that determinism is hardly a new idea. Theology determinism goes back quite early. But scientific determinism has been common since Newton. It is not necessary to know the physiology of the brain to realize that in principle there is probably a determinist explanation. Jonathan Edwards wrote a book in the 18th Cent that largely rejected free will. While he was a theologian and is part of the anti-free will tradition, I believe his writing is inflluenced by scientific determinism as well.
The question is whether it's possible to give a coherent account of human responsibility when at least some level of determinism is present. I believe so, though this probably isn't the place to do it. Indeed I think the dominant free will oriented explanations have led us into trouble. Most people now believe that responsibility can only exist when people make decisions that can't be explained. I don't think that made sense even in the 18th Cent, but if we don't come up with an alternative now, we're likely to end up with some pretty unpleasant consequences, as suggested in this posting.
You suggest that free will was dreamed up to save God from responsibility. In modern discussions of religion, God's responsibiliity for evil is a significant issue. As far as I can tell, this is fairly recent. That problem wasn't sufficiently bothersome in the formative period to be the foundation of free will. Rather, free will is a pretty obvious idea in any naive concept of psychololgy. Indeed in Christian history is was generally determinism that had to explain itself. It came from fairly specific ideas of sin and redemption, which I would say have always been considered controversial.
If the legal system remains unchanged, then I agree that these things may not matter. But the concern is that it may not remain unchanged.
>before Apple got out a consumer OS with the same.
Win32 is an API, not an OS. Protected memory is an attribute of the OS, not the API. If we're talking about significant consumer implementations, the first serious implementation of win32 would be Windows 95. (Earlier ones were NT 3.51 and Win32s in Windows 3.1.) That's 1995.
The Mac equivalent to the win32 API would be Carbon. I agree that the first real protected mode implementation was 2001, with OS X, though I'm not convinced that anything before 10.2 was commercially significant. That's in 2002.
But that's still a long gap. While some had a different experience, during that gap I remember that every time my Mac staff wanted to show me something, their systems hung. I told them to come see me again when they had a real OS. Of course now they do, and I prefer it to XP/Vista.
With this license agreement, Novell has a license to put MS patented technology into their Linux. Is it safe to permit Novell engineers to submit code to common Linux repositories? It seems to me that they would need to certify that none of their code contains any of the MS IP that they now have access to. Unless MS is willing to identify which portions of SuSE are covered by their patents, this could be difficult.
The comments here seem to be individual experience. While I don't know of any systematic surveys, you can do better than this by reading the Apple discussion boards regularly. Of course every product will have failures. But it seems clear that the Macbook Pro had more than usual. The primary issues were heating and various noises. It also seems that those problems have been fixed (for about a month), by a combination of things: replacing bad inverters, an update to the firmware to change fan behavior, and a new motherboard. The fixes were done in that order. The most recent is the motherboard replacement. Since that was done I haven't seen signs that the MPB has an abnormal level of failures. As far as I know, the iMac and Mini have not had abnormal failures. I haven't been following the Macbook discussions, so I'm not going to summarize the situation there. There is at least one worrisome problem (staining of the white plastic), and there may be others. The G3 iBooks had several endemic problems, although not at the level of the initial Macbook Pro problems. The G4 iBooks seem to have been fine. I'm not in a position to comment how this experience compares to PC architecture.
There seems to be a lot of FUD in this discussion. At least in New Jersey, at middle and secondary level, you can become "highly qualified" by * holding a BA * having been certified to teach with no requirements waived * meeting any of a whole list of qualifications, one of which is having an undergraduate major (or graduate degree) in the area you're teaching For veteran teachers there is an alternative approach, that involves getting points from various things, including college work in the subject area, good evaluations, serving on standards commiittees, and work with content area specialists. It does not require getting a masters, and it seems skewed to content rather than education theory. Furthermore, at least in NJ, the school is not permitted to fire people who haven't met the standards yet.
At a number of institutions (including mine) there are joint majors, education and some substantive area. In mine, math and physics both have programs with the education school. I believe you get a BA in math or physics and a masters in education, in 5 years. There may well be other fields as well -- I was investigating opportunities for a high school student who was interested in math and physics. I talked with a faculty member in math: the department considers it a serious program; graduates have as much math as a pure math major.
My problem with global warming advocates isn't so much on bad science (although I think it's there). Rather, the advocacy seems to be associated with a politics that doesn't look very useful. Perhaps we should start concentrating on identifying areas that are likely to be damaged and develping plans to help them. It doesn't actually matter that much whether it's human effects or sunspots causing it, unless we can plausibly stop the changes in time to protect from the negative consequences. But no one I've seen has a plausiblel plan to do that. Kyoto seems like an incredible waste of resources which should be going into preparing the areas that are going to be affected.
I should note that this issue is not limited to prayer studies. Many studies in economics and other social sciences are subject to the same criticism. You can't try 20 different models, find one that fits, and then claim that you have a result at the .05 significance level. You'd expect that by chance. It's what .05 significance means. (Again, this assumes independence, which is not typically true, but the basic criticism is still valid.)
Of course it's perfectly valid to find something interesting and then do a second test with that as the main hypothesis. I suspect that if we look at the paper, we'll find that the authors recommend further study of the things that turned out positive.
These days security is an issue. But with a compute cluster I'll bet I could come up with a setup where moderate errors wouldn't compromise the rest of the network. A compute cluster is easier because people won't be running browsers on it or reading their email there. That eliminates most of the user-caused problems. So at that point a tight firewall may be enough. On a small research machine used by one research project you're not really trying to protect users from each other. So many of the traditional concerns about protection don't apply.
I hope this posting is a troll, and not a posting by an actual Christian. The fact that there are serious disagreements among Christians is bad enough, without making a point of it in a context like this. Who needs atheists, when Christians can be relied on to do ourselves in.
In sum, my position at the moment is that ID is at least a scientific hypothesis, and that currently there's at least moderately convincing evidence against it.
Since some posters have been challenging "moderate" Christians to say something, I will note that I'm a Christian, and as far as I can tell (not being a specialist in the field) evolution is a fairly well established model. I teach Sunday School (7th and 8th grade). I'm thinking of covering questions of origins there. If I do, it will probably end up more a science education project than theology -- I'm not that impressed with what my students seem to have learned in areas I would have hoped the schools would cover. For Sunday School that includes primarily ancient history and English (the ability to read a text and get some idea of what the author was doing).
In some of the discussions I'm hearing (not just here, but among faculty), I think scientists are being too defensive. I understand why. But kids need to learn how to assess scientific and pseudo-scientific arguments. I think it would make sense to explain irreducible complexity, talk about the question of how you'd test it, and look at some of the arguments against it. If we try to rule discussions like this out of court, we're going to produce kids who think evolution can't stand up to challenge. There are enough politically popular things we're teaching that actually can't stand investigation that people who don't take time to look at the science could quite reasonably lump evolution in with them.
There's a reasonable chance that it should be translated "the women should not chatter in church", i.e. that it's addressing a specific problem. Since Paul acknowledges women as fellow Christian leaders, and says what they should wear when addressing the congregation, the traditional interpretation seems hard to take.
In the end you're going to have to ask vendors (or advocates for free solutions) to give you examples of configurations. There are certainly candidates. I believe Sun's JES is used by some large ISPs. Novell has a couple of products that might be interesting. Mirapoint makes appliances which are very much worth looking at. I'm sure you know what to ask these folks: give us examples of configurations that actually are used in large-scale installations. What I liked about Communigate is that their multisystem setups looked more symmetrical than some of the alternatives. The main reason I didn't look at them was that I was looking to do mail and calendaring and at the time they didn't have calendaring. They do now. Also look at what other service you're going to need: spam protection, support for Blackberry and other mobile access. Vendors ought to be able to tell you how to integrate these support services.
This report was bogus. They reported a threading problem in Apache 1.3, which isn't threaded. I tried duplicating the results, and found even the raw data reported suspicious.
Some comment has been made about Jones' religion, which appears to be Jehovah's Witness. As moderator of soc.religion.christian I try to keep informed on the major Christian and almost-Christian groups. However I will warn you that I haven't had a lot of personal contact with JW's. I wouldn't quite characterize the JW beliefs as "loopy". Their most serious theological problem is rejecting the Trinity, but that's a judgement reasonable people can disagree about. It's not the sort of science fiction that you'll see in theology that I *would* characterize as loopy. I'd say it's just wrong. The most serious objections are to the authority claimed by their central organization, and the way it has somes been exercized, e.g. in prohibiting transfusions and deemphasizing higher education, as well as discipline that is considered excessively harsh by many other Christians. But none of this is relevant to the credibility of individual JWs in matters such as legal commentary. Their overall ethics, including matters such as proper handling of the truth, are as far as I can tell the usual ones. And as a moderately high-pressure sect, their members are probably more likely than the average actually to follow the official ethics. Obviously stereotypes are misleading -- you need to judge individuals. But to the extent that the JWs create a stereotype in my mind, it is not one that would discredit the credibility of Groklaw. I wouldn't necessarily depend upon a JW's judgements on how to live my life, but I find nothing improbable about a JW being an honest and competent paralegal.
I think this actuallly makes sense. MS understands the reality that they're not going to get people in 3rd world countries to pay anything like the US price. So they're coming up with an edition that will get them as much money as they can realistically expect. It will be preinstalled, just as most copies are preinstalled here. So there's not really an issue of convincing people to install it. It won't actually matter to them if people overwrite it with an illicit copy of the real thing, since they've gotten as much money by getting this preinstalled as they can reasonably expect. (In fact they might actually be better off if everyone replaces it with the real thing - there's no point having your whole user population mad at you for being forced to use a crippled product.) The only question I see is whether they wouldn't be better off just to give a 95% discount on the normal product. I assume this would get them in trouble with the people who they think might actually pay for the real thing.
1) Someone said that root isn't active by default. That's sort of true. Root obviously exists. Anyone who is in the group admin can do "sudo" to do a specific command as root. They have to type their password to use sudo. However they can't login as root or su to root, because root doesn't have a password. If you want to be able to su to root, you give root a password by "sudo passwd root" or something similar. That command is not documented by Apple. They intend that users who want to do something as root will use sudo. "sudo bash" would appear to be functionally equivalent to "su", so assigning a password to root doesn't seem necessary, and is probably not best practice.
2) There has been a lot of discussion about creating files in /Library/StartupItems. On a system that was installed from scratch a couple of months ago with the most recent OS, /Library/StartupItems is protected 755 root:wheel. On an older system it is protected 775 root:wheel. But you need to realize that wheel is *not* the admin group. My normal uid, which is an administrator, is not in wheel. The admin group is admin.
This is on a system with 775 root:wheel.Apple has done their best to make sure that you must type the password of an administrator before doing anything one would think of as administrator actions. Frankly I think there are enough corners in any complex OS to get unwary users to install Trojans. But some of the info in this thread has been wrong.
The Rutgers central systems are in the process of moving antivirus processing from "appliances" made by a major AV vendor to our own Linux systems using Amavis. Amavis is smart enough not to send notifications to users in response to Sobig. The appliances do not appear to have an option to disable this. The move isn't quite finished, but the high-volume systems should now be on Amavis. That change is quite recent.