This indignant blowhard is the biggest black eye for opensource in existance. Why _anyone_ listens to him is a mystery.. it is certainly NOT because of factual accuracy or relevance.
I mean surely the MS TCP/IP stack, which is heavily multi-threaded and optimized for multiple CPU boxes, MUST have been a port-it-only lifting of the BSD stack, which at the time didn't support SMP at all. Naturally coming up with a high performanc tcp stack that uses multiple processors to work packets across multiple interfaces with next to zero blocking is what you'd get by looking at 15 year old BSD code and just changing the make flags.
The online game i've played the most is Project Gotham 2.
It literally is something you can pick up, do a few races, and then sign off. It doesn't require an enormous time commitment to get good at - you either know how to drive according to the gotham physics engine or you dont.
I'm a huge racing game fan. PGR2 is pretty arcadey in some aspects, but picking up its quirks and getting fast was pretty easy. I've never been in a race where other people just outclassed me completely.
splinter cell 2 is another one where you can just hop online play a few matches, and then you're done.
These are xbox live games, so theres no per-game monthly fee, and if i dont play the game for a month i dont feel like i'm not staying competitive, i don't feel like i'm wasting my money.
The ability to voice chat with people on my friends list and just turn on the machine and race some of them for a few runs is really compelling.
The biggest issue with online gaming is not that it's a flawed model. The implementatinos need to get better (and they will). It's still faster/easier to start a single player race on PGR2 than it is to get into a multi-player race that you like. But not by much.
"the idea is to prevent fully compatabile implementations"
here's one.
Maybe the idea is this - if MS patents stuff they're putting in their products, then they dont have to worry about bullshit litigation-only companies suing them after they release something ?
How many companies have one totally bogus patent lawsuits against MS now ? How many patent lawsuits has MS filed against someone else ?
The historical evidence indicates this is a defensive move.
I was at UNL a few years ago
on
Robocones
·
· Score: 2, Informative
and they were talking about doing this. A few different faculty were working on it.
It was _not_ some kids thesis.
I had the same reaction everyone here is having. "Who's going to buy a multi-thousand dollar traffic barrel ?"
And the answer is..
Somebody thats had to pay even _one_ workmans comp/disability suit because one of their crew got creamed by a car or truck at highway speeds.
If you think about it, its a very unglamorous meat-space problem, but solving it with technology means working on some pretty slick stuff...
which is sort of what the UNL CS/CSeng dept was like:)
i certainly didn't mean to point anyone at the idea of religious relativism:)
my comments basically revolve around people's objections, based on their own limited understanding, to events depicted in the bible.
one of the other axioms under evaluation is that the bible is inerrant. if one buys that, there's not a lot of room for religious relatavism.
furthermore, there's the self-referential aspect of this in the bible. the bible says its the unaltered word of god. If you beleive anything in the bible, it's hard to ignore the part where it says "part of beleeiving this book is beleiving that its been unaltered"
the info about the time discrepancy in the archalogical dig is interesting, thanks for pointing that out.
your comments about using historical / archaoligical evidence are well considered, and echo those in the original article.
If people are going to use history/archaeology to defend the accuracy of the bible, they can't gloss over history/archaeology that appears to challenge the accuracy of the bible.
it is my feeling that there is more that is historically thought to be accurate in the bible than there is which looks historically inaccurate. your feeling might be different.
it is not uncommon for non-religious historians/arcaheologists to consult the bible for their own research, so my view is not necessarily unfounded.
First off, i do not consider Wikipedia an authoratative source of information on anything.
That said, i'll still argue your points.
There are many things about Catholocism which make is questionable to evangelical christians. Wikipedia claims Catholics beleive there's more to it than the bible. that in and of itself is enough to distance them from evangelicals. If, as you claim, catholics beleive that faith alone is not sufficient to reach heaven, then that's an additional strike against.
I'm fine saying that catholocism isn't "true" christianity, although i'd say its closer than Mormonism.
I'm referring to the jewish law as the standard, which comes after the fall. Previously there was no standard of behavior, nor were humans intrinsically flawed.
One of the reasons jesus stopped by was because the philistines were living legalistically, according to the (impossible to fully acheive) jewish law, while not really getting "the point". A framework where by one thinks they can get closer to god / getting "right" with god by their own volition discounts the need for Jesus, which is violently anti-Christian.
The point about tolerance and non beleivers is that christianity doesn't assert God's law, it asks that you try and obey it, because you beleive it's the right thing to do. That is unique, afaict.
the skeptics bible is hardly shutting the door on the accuracy or inaccuracy of the bible:)
i'll take the first point from each of those links, and offer a naive rebuttal:
bad science, 1: The Genesis 1 account also conflicts with the order of events that are known to science. In this account the earth is created before light and stars, birds and whales before reptiles and insects, and flowering plants before any animals. From science, we know the true order of events was just the opposite. 1:1-2:3
The problem here is two fold. One, it is assuming that our idea of science accurately reflects reality. Science is always the "current best idea" about something, until a better idea comes along. The stated assumption here is that science is "true", which is in itself completely incorrect.
In any case, I understand methods by which the age of things on earth is estimated (U235/U238 ratios, carbon dating, etc) and find no fundamental problem with those methods.
based on the techniques we have for dating things, it would appear that this account is inconsistant with our own measurements.
On the other hand, this account says that each of these events took place on successive days.
Why be willing to buy that this account is literally accurate and the creation of fossil evidence or uranium deposits in earth are beyond gods control, but that he can make planets and stars willy nilly in just a matter of "days" ?
Indeed, from the skeptics bible you see this link: http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/stars _made.html
which they interpret as meaning that the stars came before the earth.
i guess my point here is that genesis is an account of when god got around to making things. its clearly on a timeline that only makes sense to god (making/filling the earth took longer than making the sun and all the stars, for instance), and there's nothing that says "i made the earth to look 1 day older than the sun", it just says "made the earth". Perhaps part of creating the earth and the stars was to make them with explicit age indicators, so that our ideas about science and the elements and what not could be properly developed. Ultimately, its not my problem to solve.
IOW, why is the use of uranium dating or star aging a reason to dispute a story that says "it took me 1 day to make all the stars in the universe"
Link 2: on the subject of how many people jesus appeared to: http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/ 11_or _12.html
This doesn't seem contradictory to me. Where it says "the twelve", presume that it is referring to "the disciples" as a name, not as a count of bodies. Perhaps it could have just as easily been written as "the disciples".
With that interpretation, the "ten" case just says "thomas, called didymus, was not with them"
There is no explicit of a number in that case.
In the "11" scenarios, it says "the eleven" in all three corroborating versions.
For the "12" scenario, it just says "the 12", which one can interpret as meaning "the disciples", again, not by reading it as a literal value, but as a name for the group. There is no mention that "all of the 12" or "the complete set of 12" or "all people whom were disciples".
Keep in mind that there are 5 separate accounts being compared here. 3 of them agree literally. The other 2 of them can be made to agree if you use "the disciples" and "the 12" interchangably, as i beleive is often done in the bible.
Link 3:
God says that if Adam eats from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then the day that he does so, he will die. But later Adam eats the forbidden fruit (3:6) and yet lives for another 930 years (5:5). 2:17
if there was anything in the bible that was uncontestably false, nobody would beleive in the bible anymore.
there are many well known _objections_ to some things in the bible, but i'm not aware of anything that is universally understood to be simply incorrect. are you ? if so, please point said inconsistancies out to me.
i don't see what's bizarre about the existance of an omnipotent god.
The other axioms can be reduced to side effects of that axiom. I just called them out for clarity in the original post.
Now, all that said, you ask why biblically based religion is different than others, and why you should beleive in any of them at all, much less the bible.
Why one might choose christianity over other religions is an argument im not prepared to win. Ultimately, it comes down to a personal decision for each beleiver. Arguably, much of that decision is shaped by world view and upbringing, but there are lots of people who become christians in highly anti-christian environments (and once upon a time, there was no "my dad's a christian, so i'll become one" scenario, because there was no established church and no other followers)
As far as what makes the bible palatable - again thats something for each person to evaluate themselves.
In my case, I decided that it's more likely that the bible is what it claims to be than it's not, based on the peices of it that have been externally validated (via archaeology or other documents) and arguments presented in a book called "The Case For Christ", which I highly recommend for biblical skeptics.
Incidentally, there are some other attributes of christianity that I think make it unique amongst world religions, but I could be mistaken on some of them, as I'm not even an expert in my own choice, much less all the choices i didn't make.
One departure from many other religions is the notion that nothing man can do can ever make them "right" in the eyes of god. Lots of other religions have a concept of actions or works that lead one closer to god or to some higher plane of existance (Mormonism, for instance). This is boldly incompatible with Christianity.
Another departure is that beleivers are compelled to do what is "right", it is not measured, or required, or forced on them. In religions that have strict moral codes I'm not sure if thats a doctrinal difference or a human-manufactured implementation, but i suspect its at least partially the former. Christianity has a built-in concept of understanding that some people will choose to not be christians, and that a humans ability to decide for themselves is core to how god made humans. (free will). Furthermore, the standard of behavior described in the bible is purposefully not acheivable by any human. It is expected that all christians fail to live up to the framework presented; this reinforces the first point, and it also acts as the foundation for which christians are not called to judge each other, as none are worthy. This frees people from living a legalistic life as opposed to a spiritual one.
Hopefully that made a little sense, and furthermore, didn't butcher any of the issues too badly;)
1. the bible is all made up 2. there's no way $situation could happen 3. this wont prove anything
To which i have a few short responses. Please give them some consideration before flaming me:)
1. This is a hard argument to make. The bible talks about lots of different things. Some of these things have been verified via archalogical evidence. Insofar as a recording of ancient history, the bible is surprisingly accurate in all of the things it depicts which are verifiable
Note that this is sort of the same as me writing a book with 100 pages, and on 3 randomly distributed pages, i describe newtonian physics, and the other 97 pages contain stuff that doesn't make sense to anybody, and can't be proven or disproven using any known technique
From a scientific perspective, my book isn't very interesting.
Until somebody figure's out page 4. And then in another 50 years, maybe someone figures out what page 5 means. And so on.
There's lots of stuff described in the bible that has been shown to be historically consistant. Much more than has shown to be historically inconsistant.
2. This won't be a very satisfying answer, but here goes.
the bible is sort of axiomatic. If you beleive - that god is all powerful - always does what is right - is smarter than you - the bible is the inerrant word of god as transcribed via people divinely inspired to do so
then a lot of what happens in the bible can be swallowed. Still, some things are hard to beleive. It's hard to beleive that somebody could part a body of water so that people could walk through it unharmed. It's hard to beleive because we've never seen anything like it, and because we cant explain how it would work.
There are lots of things in the bible that we have a hard time buying for those reasons - we've never experienced it, and we can't understand/explain how it would work.
The first "Reason" isn't a reason at all. We never experienced the creation of planet earth, but we know it happened. None of us were alive when president lincoln was shot, but most of us know it happened. The issue of never experiencing something personaly is really not an effective argument against unbeleivable things depicted in the bible.
The more interesting and common argument is the second one - there's no way that could happen. This usually revolves around some scientific argument, or rather, some lack of a scientific explanation for how it _could_ have happened. Parting seas, turning water into blood, feeding thousands with just a little food, healing blindless/leprosy/etc.
This is where the axiomatic nature of things comes into play.
If you buy that God is all powerful, then god can do whatever he wants to, certainly any of the above mentioned things.
The part is what people _Really_ dont like to hear. Just because _you_ cant explain something, doesn't mean god doesn't know how it works. Your inability to come up with a thoery or explanation for how something could have happened isn't standing in the way of an all powerful smarter-than-you god in the slightest.
So, if you buy the basic axioms of god, the rest sort of comes out in the wash. It's nice when science or achaeology catches up with what the bible has already described, but its not necessary.
3. Of course not. The point isn't to prove god exists. You either think he does or you don't. If it was factually obvious that god existed then you having a choice in the matter of wether to beleive or not wouldn't be very useful, now would it ?
I'm frankly not sure what the point of this trip is, but it won't prove god does or doesn't exist. People that refuse to beleive in god will read the results of this journey how they want to. People that refuse to beleive in anyting but god will read the results of this journey how they want to.
nothing about cars has fundamentally changed in a long time. The trend has been to replace mechanical systems with electronic ones, and to make the electronic systems better by giving them more data to work with.. and finally to make them programmable and adaptable to give you precision and adaptability that mechanical systems could never acheive.
That said, some cars are pragmatically easier to work on than others. Owners of VAG products (VW, Audi, SEAT, Skoda) can purchase a VAG-COM which flawlessly emulates the VAS-1551 dealer service computer, with just a special cable and some windows softare.
BMW's on the other hand require the MODIC/DIS system which is horribly expensive (5 figures) and hard to come by. No shade-tree alternative exists.
Really though, the function of a car is the same as it was 10 or 100 years ago. For the engine to run, you need spark and you need fuel. The methods by which spark and fuel are delivered, timed, proportioned, etc have changed, but the fundamentals are the same. A carburetter was mechanical device that answered the question of "for this operating situation, how much gas do i need" ? Fuel injection answers the same question. Analog EFI answers the same question with resistor and cap "programming" (because the amount of fuel to deliver is a FUNCTION of multiple variables). Digital EFI answers the same question with actual code to interpolate the function's value based on data stored in the ROM. The "function" isn't defined as a function, but as an n-dimensional discrete map of the n inputs the EFI computer considers in making its desicion (air mass, load, etc). In other words, you have points along the RPM axis, points along the load axis, points along the air mass axis, etc. f(load, rpm, air mass) is calculated not by an actual evaluation, but as an interpolation based on looking at the stored defined values in that region of the space (4d, in this case).
On a carburettor you adjusted the jets to make sure the output function was appropriate for the inputs. On digital EFI you make sure that the inputs are appropriate (i.e. the temp sensor, the MAF, the TPS, etc).
These solid state compnents can be easily tested with a multi-meter, so you can quickly troubleshoot the list of sensors involved in the EFI system to determine which input is lying to the computer.
On modern cars its even easier, if you have the diagnostic tool (like a VAG-COM) - the diagnostics will often tell you which sensor is out of spec, and then you can troubleshoot the physical condition (sensor bad ? wire bad ?, etc)
not a single thing was said about how it works. How does the 2nd keyboard direct its keystrokes to the 2nd display ? Is the 2nd display an RDP client, or is it a 2nd monitor of window session 0 ? Are the two users running as different XP logins ? what does the magic twin software do ? new keyboard driver ? new mouse driver ? new audio driver ?
Without knowing how this thing works, it's a non article.
Given how much work i do on cars, im somewhat nervous about vehicle data loggers being used as uncontestable evidence.. or evidence that is de facto uncontestable to the average jury of "peers".
for instance - VW's are notorious for lighting up the airbag light - indicating that the airbag ecu thinks something is wrong with itself. The CEL/MIL lights on modern cars fire as a matter of course. All kinds of drivability problems on electronically managed cars really come down to the ECU making a poor decision because one of its sensors was lying to it.
Making highly reliable decision networks for automobiles for an american public that hates to feel like they're getting scammed by mechanics, doesn't understand cars even more than it doesn't understand computers, and as a result tends to let cars fall apart rather than pay through the nose to fix them...
is...difficult.
when those systems become admissable court evidence, then yes, i think everyone should be a little concerned.
88 BMW M5 (no black box) 88 Audi 90Quattro (no black box) 00 VW Passat Wagon (several black boxes, including ones that record current speed, current rpm, current throttle position, etc (not sure if these have a queryable memory or just real-time logging, though)
The "tech" sector there is just terrible. The same rednecks start one small business after another, then blow all the startup money, and the same dumb guys that work call center / customer support move from failed business to failed business.
There are almost NO technology pure-play companies. That means anywhere you're doing IT or software, you're doing it in somebody's cost center, and that means you're always subject to "cost savings measures"
I know a few really smart guys in louisville, but there are a few really smart guys everywhere.
And louisville is the only part of KY where the tooth:person ratio is greater than 1.
Someone will probably mention "lexington", where there is apparently a university called "UofK". Stop being delusional. There are some neat projects at UofK, but its an also-ran as a compsci school, utterly un-noteworthy.
Nothing about the WW2 bombings was "incidental". You can agree or disagree with the decisions that were made but revisionist history doesn't do people any good.
Furthermore, this coment has nothing to do with the discussino at hand - it's just a way for you to get people riled up.
So in effect, regardless of the merits of your viewpoint, you're trolling.
except the most likely scenario for a US nuclear detonation on US soil has nothing to do with an ICBM, and everything to do with someone parking a van in a metropolitan area.
Comment 1) dont mix business and personal life. If its your personal phone, don't pollute it with work related stuff. Just like you shouldn't pollute your home email box with work related stuff
Comment 2) maybe there's a reason your employer came up with this rule. question whoever came up with the policy as to why they're doing it
Comment 3) if, after considering their reasoning, and your own motivations, you decide you still want to have your phone at work, i suggest you just keep on carrying it anyway. If someone at work tries to give you a hard time about it, tell them if they're that upset about it, they can fire you. remind them that work isn't jail, and they have no right whatsoever to tell you to do anything. if they start to interrupt you, tell them to shut the fuck up until you're finished talking to them. Continue laying out your argument, ask them if they have any questions, and then continue doing whatever it was you were doing.
people that seek to exert arbitrary authority over others are assholes and must not be tolerated.
i like to keep the following proverb in mind when considering my dealings with people (as an aside, an ex-girlfriend clued me into this one, probably because i was (am?) a self righteous conceited asshole):
"After the Game, the King and the Pawn go back into the same box"
Why shouldn't I ? few electricians or plumbers have more than a highschool education. I can read the National Electric Code just as well as anyone else with basic literary skills, and unlike most electricians, my engineering time in college has given me some background in physics, EE, and power engineering so that i even have a little context to figure out where the rules come from.
The "electrical" part of electrician work for around the house type jobs is totally trivial. I mean, its all color coded. The "work" is figuring out how to route wires, pulling them, wiiring terminals, patching holes, etc etc etc. The actual "electrician" work of enabling a new wire run with a breaker back at the service entrance now takes me less than 2 minutes of total time. Can you do basic multiplication ? You can plan new circuits!
I've also upgraded and expanded the gas piping network in both of my houses. You cant begin to imagine how much that costs for what is essentially measuring pipes and screwing them together with pipe wrenches (you can buy an awful lot of pipewrenches for 1hr of pipe labour)
I also happen to have more upper body strength than most plumbers i've met, so its not like they're tightening pipes with more torque than i am:)
It's always nice though when the pro's come and look over your house, and compliment your work. And I smile all the way to the bank.
Specialization is for insects.
Remember - you CAN do it yourself. I'm a software person by employment, but consider the following things i've done in the last year: - replaced clutch on car - replaced brake pads/rotors - replaced radiator - replaced/repaired exhaust manifold - replaced idle control valve - replaced height-adjusting suspension components - repaired $1300 ECU (cold solder joints) - added new gas pipes for 2 dryers (2 different houses) - added new pipes to support tankless water heater (which i also installed) - tiled 2 bathrooms and a kitchen - stud-wall kitchen remodel (all electrical, flooring, walls, cabinet installs, plumbing, lighting, appliances, moving an hvac register) - jetted bathtub install
My wife and I did every remodelling job in our last house ourselves. We called a structural engineer to help analyze one situation with a crooked house jack, and hired one general contractor to do the bathtub drain (i was still afraid of the crawlspace at that point)
We made a killing selling that house because we did the work in our spare time, price shopping the cost of materials. While we lived there we had a beautiful house to live in and use, and when we sold it our improvements paid off handsomely. Not to mention the incredible sense of accomplishment you get from doing things yourself. You what quality of work was done, you learn more about what to do next time, and you dont have that sucking feeling of getting ripped off that you get every time you write a check for a "pro" to do a shitty job.
In my basement right now is my first peice of wooden furniture. We couldnt' find a nice set of wood shelves of the appropriate height, so i figured i'd build some. We'll see how my finish carpentry skills progress.
lets suppose that the xbox2 isn't backwards compatible.
lets say that alienates the _entire_ xbox1 installed base... but lets also say that because it wasn't backwards compat, it was cheaper. let us also further say that the best graphics, audio, and online experiences could be had on xbox2. finally, lets say that all the best games were on xbox2 (ok, thats a stretch;)
so which is the better move - alienate 100% of a small (xbox1) installed base, and in turn gain 50% of the sony installed base.. or retain (some) percent of the xbox1 installed base, but not gain as much of the sony installed base ?
backwards compat in a console didn't exist before PS2. It's not a must-have feature.
i didn't mean to suggest that the time was irrespective of how much cpu you threw at it.. only that you can say that the complexity of the solver is of a given order.. and that no more optimal solution to solve such a problem exists.
for instance, there is no magical way of factoring the product of primes; the best algorithms known today are suspected to be the best possible approaches. Therefore, given a prime of a given size, one can estimate how many operations will be required to factor it. it then becomes trivial to increase the size of the prime until the suggested computational cost is "big enough"
if someone figures out how to factor primes "fast enough", then we're all in bad shape. factoring primes is just one such problem, there are probably actually much better examples of problems where there is theory suggesting that they cannot have a more optimal solution algorithm than the one published.
therefore, even if one builds dedicated hardware, it's still just a hardware implementation of a understood attack algorithm. the size of the problem only need to take this into account (i.e. software implementations run 20x slower than hardware.. fine.. make the problem 20x harder:)
1) the open relays problem / drone network this is a real problem and before something like computational challenges can work, the barrier to infecting 10000 machines and having them run the code of your choice has to get a lot higher.
2) you're incorrect here. you can choose an algorithm suitably well such that the sky of mathematics and theoretical comp sci falls down if someone figures out a good way to attack it in substantially faster than thought possible time. DES (as commonly implemented) does not have this property.
The people at MSR are well aware of what would be needed to make a difficult to defeat scheme. the issue is making it fair to slower computers. I'm sure they've thought about that also.
Why is paying computationally a losing battle ? I have this computer that mostly sends email.. email in the same format that was being sent in 1983. Surely the 4-5 orders of magnitude perf increase since then means that i can now afford to do a little math when i hit "send" ?
paying with real money is a problem. agreed 100%
spam assassin does NOT work fine, because it works at the wrong end of the the problem.
spam assassin works after the receiving server (and any between) have relayed/accepted the message, and it has been delivered to the users mailstore. everyone has been charged for bandwidth, the recipient has been charged for storage, the recipient was charged cpu power to run spam assassin, and spam assassin is hardly foolproof.
the motivation for a math-puzzle-charge problem is to counteract all of those factors. until the sender is willing to spend resources, he doesn't get to spend any of yours. thats the rational argument against spam- stealing from others is illegal, and spam does exactly that. this approach puts up some cost associated with that theft, namely, computational cost.
remember, government is the least efficient way to get something done. if we can solve this in the general case with technology, thats a plus. when someone particularly onerous starts spamming effectively enough to get noticed, then they can get swatted with the law.
finally, this isn't something you mentinoed but others have.. some people are worried about existing or older mail clients.. or say mail from devices or monitoring systems.
nothing says this has to be an all or nothing approach. this scheme could work very well in combination with whitelisting.. as in whitelisted source addresses don't need to do the computation... of course that leads to spoofing the from address.. it will need to be necessary to make the whitelist suitably detailed so as not to allow that attack to be effective (i.e. the whitelist would be more than just the sending address.. perhaps a sender regex match and a message body regex match)
the Passats you see in the US are NOT representative of the euro market models. Re-read what i said about the passat - over there it has a much much wider variety of engine choices... all of which are lower displacement than the 2.8 offered here.
The 2.8 incidentally is not a bad motor - far from it - it makes 190hp and 203 ft/lbs, revs very freely with a near 7000 rpm limit.
Re: right to criticize - well, its common for someone in germany with a RUF 911 or similar gas guzzling car to ride their bike to the market instead of drive the porsche. so in that sense, when people take to the roads they do so to DRIVE, not for a 5 minute start/stop cycle. The fuel costs in germany HAVE affected peoples thoughts on driving there in a way that they haven't in the US.
the basemodel passat and jetta engine is a 1.8L turbo in the states. Not a gas guzzler by any means. Nor the pinnacle of fuel economy, but all in all it is a good powerplant.
Really we'd all be better off if people were driving base model passats as opposed to escalades or grand cherokees. That may have been the point being made. Here in Fargo, essentially every vehicle is a GM with the 3800 motor. 3.8L for an uninspiring, underwhelming car seems ridiculous. That's more than some of europes most exotic super cars.
the german cars that come to the states are not representative of what most of europe is driving. only the large displacement engines make the journey over the pond do the US market. BMW has numerous 4 cylinder and diseel models but these are not seen in the states because they are not cost effective to bring here, and to a lesser extent don't support BMW's branding image of a luxuruy marque.
Similarly, the VW Passat has something like 20 engine and gearbox combinations in germany but very few here.
That said, japan makes some very fuel efficient cars. The fuel efficient ones tend to be pretty shitty in terms of sporting character, however. The typical german car doesn't suffer from this... especially the TD models.. the base turbodeisel engines in german spec vehicles are putting out similar torque to the highest performing JDM vehicles. 320nm in a subcompact TD is not uncommon, of less than 2 liters displacement.
In the USA BMW has never sold a 5 series with less than 2.5L. This is the "baby" engine here. In the 80s there was the 528e with the 2.8L "economy" motor. IN europe the idea of a 2.8L motor being "economy" or "small" is ridiculous. The same year that the USA got the 528e with 2.7L, and the 535 with 3.5L, most european markets also got a 516 with 1.6L I4, a 520 with 2.0L i4 (or i6), a 528 with 2.8L i6.
Note that all of these models are typically lighter than their US counterparts as well, (less standard options.. i.e. you could get a 7 series BMW with crank windows, and a 5 series BMW with cloth interior), which further improves fuel economy (and performance, for that matter)
VW is certainly no leader in specific output, and have some real duds in the US market (the base model 2.0 gas engine being a notable peice of garbage, in all respects). On the other hand, a comparison of JDM and euro-spec engines should take a few things into consideration
1) fuel quality and type 2) displacement 3) total output 4) specific output 5) torque profile 6) powerplant weight
i think what you'll find is that many JDM (and us imported) motors are very lacking in torque as compared to US and german counterparts. While high specific output is admirable, the difference between a 240hp Honda S2000 motor and a 240hp E36 M3 motor is more than 0hp. The M3 takes an extra liter of displacement, but rewards you with roughly 80 more ft/lbs of peak torque, and over a MUCH broader range than the S2000 motor. That is a 50% torque increase (which golly.. so is the displacement increase).
Wether or not performance, torque, flexibility, etc are important to you is up to you and your driving style. the BMW i6 is a very economical motor, given its capabilities. But nobody drives it for that reason.
Slashdot Mirror
This indignant blowhard is the biggest black eye for opensource in existance. Why _anyone_ listens to him is a mystery.. it is certainly NOT because of factual accuracy or relevance.
I mean surely the MS TCP/IP stack, which is heavily multi-threaded and optimized for multiple CPU boxes, MUST have been a port-it-only lifting of the BSD stack, which at the time didn't support SMP at all. Naturally coming up with a high performanc tcp stack that uses multiple processors to work packets across multiple interfaces with next to zero blocking is what you'd get by looking at 15 year old BSD code and just changing the make flags.
Give me a break.
Finding the UCB banner in ftp.exe is one thing.
FTP isn't a TCP/IP stack.
The online game i've played the most is Project Gotham 2.
It literally is something you can pick up, do a few races, and then sign off. It doesn't require an enormous time commitment to get good at - you either know how to drive according to the gotham physics engine or you dont.
I'm a huge racing game fan. PGR2 is pretty arcadey in some aspects, but picking up its quirks and getting fast was pretty easy. I've never been in a race where other people just outclassed me completely.
splinter cell 2 is another one where you can just hop online play a few matches, and then you're done.
These are xbox live games, so theres no per-game monthly fee, and if i dont play the game for a month i dont feel like i'm not staying competitive, i don't feel like i'm wasting my money.
The ability to voice chat with people on my friends list and just turn on the machine and race some of them for a few runs is really compelling.
The biggest issue with online gaming is not that it's a flawed model. The implementatinos need to get better (and they will). It's still faster/easier to start a single player race on PGR2 than it is to get into a multi-player race that you like. But not by much.
"the idea is to prevent fully compatabile implementations"
here's one.
Maybe the idea is this - if MS patents stuff they're putting in their products, then they dont have to worry about bullshit litigation-only companies suing them after they release something ?
How many companies have one totally bogus patent lawsuits against MS now ? How many patent lawsuits has MS filed against someone else ?
The historical evidence indicates this is a defensive move.
and they were talking about doing this. A few different faculty were working on it.
:)
It was _not_ some kids thesis.
I had the same reaction everyone here is having. "Who's going to buy a multi-thousand dollar traffic barrel ?"
And the answer is..
Somebody thats had to pay even _one_ workmans comp/disability suit because one of their crew got creamed by a car or truck at highway speeds.
If you think about it, its a very unglamorous meat-space problem, but solving it with technology means working on some pretty slick stuff...
which is sort of what the UNL CS/CSeng dept was like
i certainly didn't mean to point anyone at the idea of religious relativism :)
my comments basically revolve around people's objections, based on their own limited understanding, to events depicted in the bible.
one of the other axioms under evaluation is that the bible is inerrant. if one buys that, there's not a lot of room for religious relatavism.
furthermore, there's the self-referential aspect of this in the bible. the bible says its the unaltered word of god. If you beleive anything in the bible, it's hard to ignore the part where it says "part of beleeiving this book is beleiving that its been unaltered"
the info about the time discrepancy in the archalogical dig is interesting, thanks for pointing that out.
your comments about using historical / archaoligical evidence are well considered, and echo those in the original article.
If people are going to use history/archaeology to defend the accuracy of the bible, they can't gloss over history/archaeology that appears to challenge the accuracy of the bible.
it is my feeling that there is more that is historically thought to be accurate in the bible than there is which looks historically inaccurate. your feeling might be different.
it is not uncommon for non-religious historians/arcaheologists to consult the bible for their own research, so my view is not necessarily unfounded.
First off, i do not consider Wikipedia an authoratative source of information on anything.
That said, i'll still argue your points.
There are many things about Catholocism which make is questionable to evangelical christians. Wikipedia claims Catholics beleive there's more to it than the bible. that in and of itself is enough to distance them from evangelicals. If, as you claim, catholics beleive that faith alone is not sufficient to reach heaven, then that's an additional strike against.
I'm fine saying that catholocism isn't "true" christianity, although i'd say its closer than Mormonism.
I'm referring to the jewish law as the standard, which comes after the fall. Previously there was no standard of behavior, nor were humans intrinsically flawed.
One of the reasons jesus stopped by was because the philistines were living legalistically, according to the (impossible to fully acheive) jewish law, while not really getting "the point". A framework where by one thinks they can get closer to god / getting "right" with god by their own volition discounts the need for Jesus, which is violently anti-Christian.
The point about tolerance and non beleivers is that christianity doesn't assert God's law, it asks that you try and obey it, because you beleive it's the right thing to do. That is unique, afaict.
the skeptics bible is hardly shutting the door on the accuracy or inaccuracy of the bible :)
.h tml
i'll take the first point from each of those links, and offer a naive rebuttal:
bad science, 1:
The Genesis 1 account also conflicts with the order of events that are known to science. In this account the earth is created before light and stars, birds and whales before reptiles and insects, and flowering plants before any animals. From science, we know the true order of events was just the opposite. 1:1-2:3
The problem here is two fold. One, it is assuming that our idea of science accurately reflects reality. Science is always the "current best idea" about something, until a better idea comes along. The stated assumption here is that science is "true", which is in itself completely incorrect.
In any case, I understand methods by which the age of things on earth is estimated (U235/U238 ratios, carbon dating, etc) and find no fundamental problem with those methods.
based on the techniques we have for dating things, it would appear that this account is inconsistant with our own measurements.
On the other hand, this account says that each of these events took place on successive days.
Why be willing to buy that this account is literally accurate and the creation of fossil evidence or uranium deposits in earth are beyond gods control, but that he can make planets and stars willy nilly in just a matter of "days" ?
Indeed, from the skeptics bible you see this link: http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/stars _made.html
which they interpret as meaning that the stars came before the earth.
i guess my point here is that genesis is an account of when god got around to making things. its clearly on a timeline that only makes sense to god (making/filling the earth took longer than making the sun and all the stars, for instance), and there's nothing that says "i made the earth to look 1 day older than the sun", it just says "made the earth". Perhaps part of creating the earth and the stars was to make them with explicit age indicators, so that our ideas about science and the elements and what not could be properly developed. Ultimately, its not my problem to solve.
IOW, why is the use of uranium dating or star aging a reason to dispute a story that says "it took me 1 day to make all the stars in the universe"
Link 2:
on the subject of how many people jesus appeared to:
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/ 11_or _12.html
This doesn't seem contradictory to me.
Where it says "the twelve", presume that it is referring to "the disciples" as a name, not as a count of bodies. Perhaps it could have just as easily been written as "the disciples".
With that interpretation, the "ten" case just says "thomas, called didymus, was not with them"
There is no explicit of a number in that case.
In the "11" scenarios, it says "the eleven" in all three corroborating versions.
For the "12" scenario, it just says "the 12", which one can interpret as meaning "the disciples", again, not by reading it as a literal value, but as a name for the group. There is no mention that "all of the 12" or "the complete set of 12" or "all people whom were disciples".
Keep in mind that there are 5 separate accounts being compared here. 3 of them agree literally. The other 2 of them can be made to agree if you use "the disciples" and "the 12" interchangably, as i beleive is often done in the bible.
Link 3:
God says that if Adam eats from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, then the day that he does so, he will die. But later Adam eats the forbidden fruit (3:6) and yet lives for another 930 years (5:5). 2:17
http://www.skepticsannotatedbible.com/contra/day
An easy interpretation of this is that his death was spiritual. More accurately, i think the reading of this that specifies that he ha
if there was anything in the bible that was uncontestably false, nobody would beleive in the bible anymore.
there are many well known _objections_ to some things in the bible, but i'm not aware of anything that is universally understood to be simply incorrect. are you ? if so, please point said inconsistancies out to me.
i don't see what's bizarre about the existance of an omnipotent god.
;)
The other axioms can be reduced to side effects of that axiom. I just called them out for clarity in the original post.
Now, all that said, you ask why biblically based religion is different than others, and why you should beleive in any of them at all, much less the bible.
Why one might choose christianity over other religions is an argument im not prepared to win. Ultimately, it comes down to a personal decision for each beleiver. Arguably, much of that decision is shaped by world view and upbringing, but there are lots of people who become christians in highly anti-christian environments (and once upon a time, there was no "my dad's a christian, so i'll become one" scenario, because there was no established church and no other followers)
As far as what makes the bible palatable - again thats something for each person to evaluate themselves.
In my case, I decided that it's more likely that the bible is what it claims to be than it's not, based on the peices of it that have been externally validated (via archaeology or other documents) and arguments presented in a book called "The Case For Christ", which I highly recommend for biblical skeptics.
Incidentally, there are some other attributes of christianity that I think make it unique amongst world religions, but I could be mistaken on some of them, as I'm not even an expert in my own choice, much less all the choices i didn't make.
One departure from many other religions is the notion that nothing man can do can ever make them "right" in the eyes of god. Lots of other religions have a concept of actions or works that lead one closer to god or to some higher plane of existance (Mormonism, for instance). This is boldly incompatible with Christianity.
Another departure is that beleivers are compelled to do what is "right", it is not measured, or required, or forced on them. In religions that have strict moral codes I'm not sure if thats a doctrinal difference or a human-manufactured implementation, but i suspect its at least partially the former. Christianity has a built-in concept of understanding that some people will choose to not be christians, and that a humans ability to decide for themselves is core to how god made humans. (free will). Furthermore, the standard of behavior described in the bible is purposefully not acheivable by any human. It is expected that all christians fail to live up to the framework presented; this reinforces the first point, and it also acts as the foundation for which christians are not called to judge each other, as none are worthy. This frees people from living a legalistic life as opposed to a spiritual one.
Hopefully that made a little sense, and furthermore, didn't butcher any of the issues too badly
Lots of the comments revolve around a few themes
:)
1. the bible is all made up
2. there's no way $situation could happen
3. this wont prove anything
To which i have a few short responses. Please give them some consideration before flaming me
1. This is a hard argument to make. The bible talks about lots of different things. Some of these things have been verified via archalogical evidence. Insofar as a recording of ancient history, the bible is surprisingly accurate in all of the things it depicts which are verifiable
Note that this is sort of the same as me writing a book with 100 pages, and on 3 randomly distributed pages, i describe newtonian physics, and the other 97 pages contain stuff that doesn't make sense to anybody, and can't be proven or disproven using any known technique
From a scientific perspective, my book isn't very interesting.
Until somebody figure's out page 4. And then in another 50 years, maybe someone figures out what page 5 means. And so on.
There's lots of stuff described in the bible that has been shown to be historically consistant. Much more than has shown to be historically inconsistant.
2. This won't be a very satisfying answer, but here goes.
the bible is sort of axiomatic. If you beleive
- that god is all powerful
- always does what is right
- is smarter than you
- the bible is the inerrant word of god as transcribed via people divinely inspired to do so
then a lot of what happens in the bible can be swallowed. Still, some things are hard to beleive. It's hard to beleive that somebody could part a body of water so that people could walk through it unharmed. It's hard to beleive because we've never seen anything like it, and because we cant explain how it would work.
There are lots of things in the bible that we have a hard time buying for those reasons - we've never experienced it, and we can't understand/explain how it would work.
The first "Reason" isn't a reason at all. We never experienced the creation of planet earth, but we know it happened. None of us were alive when president lincoln was shot, but most of us know it happened. The issue of never experiencing something personaly is really not an effective argument against unbeleivable things depicted in the bible.
The more interesting and common argument is the second one - there's no way that could happen. This usually revolves around some scientific argument, or rather, some lack of a scientific explanation for how it _could_ have happened. Parting seas, turning water into blood, feeding thousands with just a little food, healing blindless/leprosy/etc.
This is where the axiomatic nature of things comes into play.
If you buy that God is all powerful, then god can do whatever he wants to, certainly any of the above mentioned things.
The part is what people _Really_ dont like to hear. Just because _you_ cant explain something, doesn't mean god doesn't know how it works. Your inability to come up with a thoery or explanation for how something could have happened isn't standing in the way of an all powerful smarter-than-you god in the slightest.
So, if you buy the basic axioms of god, the rest sort of comes out in the wash. It's nice when science or achaeology catches up with what the bible has already described, but its not necessary.
3. Of course not. The point isn't to prove god exists. You either think he does or you don't. If it was factually obvious that god existed then you having a choice in the matter of wether to beleive or not wouldn't be very useful, now would it ?
I'm frankly not sure what the point of this trip is, but it won't prove god does or doesn't exist. People that refuse to beleive in god will read the results of this journey how they want to. People that refuse to beleive in anyting but god will read the results of this journey how they want to.
But there's the ever important swing vote.
W
nothing about cars has fundamentally changed in a long time. The trend has been to replace mechanical systems with electronic ones, and to make the electronic systems better by giving them more data to work with.. and finally to make them programmable and adaptable to give you precision and adaptability that mechanical systems could never acheive.
That said, some cars are pragmatically easier to work on than others. Owners of VAG products (VW, Audi, SEAT, Skoda) can purchase a VAG-COM which flawlessly emulates the VAS-1551 dealer service computer, with just a special cable and some windows softare.
BMW's on the other hand require the MODIC/DIS system which is horribly expensive (5 figures) and hard to come by. No shade-tree alternative exists.
Really though, the function of a car is the same as it was 10 or 100 years ago. For the engine to run, you need spark and you need fuel. The methods by which spark and fuel are delivered, timed, proportioned, etc have changed, but the fundamentals are the same. A carburetter was mechanical device that answered the question of "for this operating situation, how much gas do i need" ? Fuel injection answers the same question. Analog EFI answers the same question with resistor and cap "programming" (because the amount of fuel to deliver is a FUNCTION of multiple variables). Digital EFI answers the same question with actual code to interpolate the function's value based on data stored in the ROM. The "function" isn't defined as a function, but as an n-dimensional discrete map of the n inputs the EFI computer considers in making its desicion (air mass, load, etc). In other words, you have points along the RPM axis, points along the load axis, points along the air mass axis, etc. f(load, rpm, air mass) is calculated not by an actual evaluation, but as an interpolation based on looking at the stored defined values in that region of the space (4d, in this case).
On a carburettor you adjusted the jets to make sure the output function was appropriate for the inputs. On digital EFI you make sure that the inputs are appropriate (i.e. the temp sensor, the MAF, the TPS, etc).
These solid state compnents can be easily tested with a multi-meter, so you can quickly troubleshoot the list of sensors involved in the EFI system to determine which input is lying to the computer.
On modern cars its even easier, if you have the diagnostic tool (like a VAG-COM) - the diagnostics will often tell you which sensor is out of spec, and then you can troubleshoot the physical condition (sensor bad ? wire bad ?, etc)
this was an ad.
not a single thing was said about how it works. How does the 2nd keyboard direct its keystrokes to the 2nd display ? Is the 2nd display an RDP client, or is it a 2nd monitor of window session 0 ? Are the two users running as different XP logins ? what does the magic twin software do ? new keyboard driver ? new mouse driver ? new audio driver ?
Without knowing how this thing works, it's a non article.
the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
...difficult.
emotionally i agree with you.
Given how much work i do on cars, im somewhat nervous about vehicle data loggers being used as uncontestable evidence.. or evidence that is de facto uncontestable to the average jury of "peers".
for instance - VW's are notorious for lighting up the airbag light - indicating that the airbag ecu thinks something is wrong with itself. The CEL/MIL lights on modern cars fire as a matter of course. All kinds of drivability problems on electronically managed cars really come down to the ECU making a poor decision because one of its sensors was lying to it.
Making highly reliable decision networks for automobiles for an american public that hates to feel like they're getting scammed by mechanics, doesn't understand cars even more than it doesn't understand computers, and as a result tends to let cars fall apart rather than pay through the nose to fix them...
is
when those systems become admissable court evidence, then yes, i think everyone should be a little concerned.
88 BMW M5 (no black box)
88 Audi 90Quattro (no black box)
00 VW Passat Wagon (several black boxes, including ones that record current speed, current rpm, current throttle position, etc (not sure if these have a queryable memory or just real-time logging, though)
just offer to let anyone on slashdot borrow your girlfriend for some "boring" ?
:)
You have a very progressive relationship
I grew up in louisville, KY.
The "tech" sector there is just terrible. The same rednecks start one small business after another, then blow all the startup money, and the same dumb guys that work call center / customer support move from failed business to failed business.
There are almost NO technology pure-play companies. That means anywhere you're doing IT or software, you're doing it in somebody's cost center, and that means you're always subject to "cost savings measures"
I know a few really smart guys in louisville, but there are a few really smart guys everywhere.
And louisville is the only part of KY where the tooth:person ratio is greater than 1.
Someone will probably mention "lexington", where there is apparently a university called "UofK". Stop being delusional. There are some neat projects at UofK, but its an also-ran as a compsci school, utterly un-noteworthy.
where are my mod points. This is a troll.
Nothing about the WW2 bombings was "incidental". You can agree or disagree with the decisions that were made but revisionist history doesn't do people any good.
Furthermore, this coment has nothing to do with the discussino at hand - it's just a way for you to get people riled up.
So in effect, regardless of the merits of your viewpoint, you're trolling.
except the most likely scenario for a US nuclear detonation on US soil has nothing to do with an ICBM, and everything to do with someone parking a van in a metropolitan area.
oops.
Comment 1) dont mix business and personal life.
If its your personal phone, don't pollute it with work related stuff. Just like you shouldn't pollute your home email box with work related stuff
Comment 2) maybe there's a reason your employer came up with this rule. question whoever came up with the policy as to why they're doing it
Comment 3) if, after considering their reasoning, and your own motivations, you decide you still want to have your phone at work, i suggest you just keep on carrying it anyway. If someone at work tries to give you a hard time about it, tell them if they're that upset about it, they can fire you. remind them that work isn't jail, and they have no right whatsoever to tell you to do anything. if they start to interrupt you, tell them to shut the fuck up until you're finished talking to them. Continue laying out your argument, ask them if they have any questions, and then continue doing whatever it was you were doing.
people that seek to exert arbitrary authority over others are assholes and must not be tolerated.
i like to keep the following proverb in mind when considering my dealings with people (as an aside, an ex-girlfriend clued me into this one, probably because i was (am?) a self righteous conceited asshole):
"After the Game, the King and the Pawn go back into the same box"
I do my own wiring, and my own plumbing.
:)
Why shouldn't I ? few electricians or plumbers have more than a highschool education. I can read the National Electric Code just as well as anyone else with basic literary skills, and unlike most electricians, my engineering time in college has given me some background in physics, EE, and power engineering so that i even have a little context to figure out where the rules come from.
The "electrical" part of electrician work for around the house type jobs is totally trivial. I mean, its all color coded. The "work" is figuring out how to route wires, pulling them, wiiring terminals, patching holes, etc etc etc. The actual "electrician" work of enabling a new wire run with a breaker back at the service entrance now takes me less than 2 minutes of total time. Can you do basic multiplication ? You can plan new circuits!
I've also upgraded and expanded the gas piping network in both of my houses. You cant begin to imagine how much that costs for what is essentially measuring pipes and screwing them together with pipe wrenches (you can buy an awful lot of pipewrenches for 1hr of pipe labour)
I also happen to have more upper body strength than most plumbers i've met, so its not like they're tightening pipes with more torque than i am
It's always nice though when the pro's come and look over your house, and compliment your work. And I smile all the way to the bank.
Specialization is for insects.
Remember - you CAN do it yourself. I'm a software person by employment, but consider the following things i've done in the last year:
- replaced clutch on car
- replaced brake pads/rotors
- replaced radiator
- replaced/repaired exhaust manifold
- replaced idle control valve
- replaced height-adjusting suspension components
- repaired $1300 ECU (cold solder joints)
- added new gas pipes for 2 dryers (2 different houses)
- added new pipes to support tankless water heater (which i also installed)
- tiled 2 bathrooms and a kitchen
- stud-wall kitchen remodel (all electrical, flooring, walls, cabinet installs, plumbing, lighting, appliances, moving an hvac register)
- jetted bathtub install
My wife and I did every remodelling job in our last house ourselves. We called a structural engineer to help analyze one situation with a crooked house jack, and hired one general contractor to do the bathtub drain (i was still afraid of the crawlspace at that point)
We made a killing selling that house because we did the work in our spare time, price shopping the cost of materials. While we lived there we had a beautiful house to live in and use, and when we sold it our improvements paid off handsomely. Not to mention the incredible sense of accomplishment you get from doing things yourself. You what quality of work was done, you learn more about what to do next time, and you dont have that sucking feeling of getting ripped off that you get every time you write a check for a "pro" to do a shitty job.
In my basement right now is my first peice of wooden furniture. We couldnt' find a nice set of wood shelves of the appropriate height, so i figured i'd build some. We'll see how my finish carpentry skills progress.
one thing to think about..
.. but lets also say that because it wasn't backwards compat, it was cheaper. let us also further say that the best graphics, audio, and online experiences could be had on xbox2. finally, lets say that all the best games were on xbox2 (ok, thats a stretch ;)
lets suppose that the xbox2 isn't backwards compatible.
lets say that alienates the _entire_ xbox1 installed base.
so which is the better move - alienate 100% of a small (xbox1) installed base, and in turn gain 50% of the sony installed base.. or retain (some) percent of the xbox1 installed base, but not gain as much of the sony installed base ?
backwards compat in a console didn't exist before PS2. It's not a must-have feature.
i didn't mean to suggest that the time was irrespective of how much cpu you threw at it.. only that you can say that the complexity of the solver is of a given order.. and that no more optimal solution to solve such a problem exists.
:)
for instance, there is no magical way of factoring the product of primes; the best algorithms known today are suspected to be the best possible approaches. Therefore, given a prime of a given size, one can estimate how many operations will be required to factor it. it then becomes trivial to increase the size of the prime until the suggested computational cost is "big enough"
if someone figures out how to factor primes "fast enough", then we're all in bad shape. factoring primes is just one such problem, there are probably actually much better examples of problems where there is theory suggesting that they cannot have a more optimal solution algorithm than the one published.
therefore, even if one builds dedicated hardware, it's still just a hardware implementation of a understood attack algorithm. the size of the problem only need to take this into account (i.e. software implementations run 20x slower than hardware.. fine.. make the problem 20x harder
1) the open relays problem / drone network
this is a real problem and before something like computational challenges can work, the barrier to infecting 10000 machines and having them run the code of your choice has to get a lot higher.
2) you're incorrect here. you can choose an algorithm suitably well such that the sky of mathematics and theoretical comp sci falls down if someone figures out a good way to attack it in substantially faster than thought possible time. DES (as commonly implemented) does not have this property.
The people at MSR are well aware of what would be needed to make a difficult to defeat scheme. the issue is making it fair to slower computers. I'm sure they've thought about that also.
Why is paying computationally a losing battle ? I have this computer that mostly sends email.. email in the same format that was being sent in 1983. Surely the 4-5 orders of magnitude perf increase since then means that i can now afford to do a little math when i hit "send" ?
paying with real money is a problem. agreed 100%
spam assassin does NOT work fine, because it works at the wrong end of the the problem.
spam assassin works after the receiving server (and any between) have relayed/accepted the message, and it has been delivered to the users mailstore. everyone has been charged for bandwidth, the recipient has been charged for storage, the recipient was charged cpu power to run spam assassin, and spam assassin is hardly foolproof.
the motivation for a math-puzzle-charge problem is to counteract all of those factors. until the sender is willing to spend resources, he doesn't get to spend any of yours. thats the rational argument against spam- stealing from others is illegal, and spam does exactly that. this approach puts up some cost associated with that theft, namely, computational cost.
remember, government is the least efficient way to get something done. if we can solve this in the general case with technology, thats a plus. when someone particularly onerous starts spamming effectively enough to get noticed, then they can get swatted with the law.
finally, this isn't something you mentinoed but others have.. some people are worried about existing or older mail clients.. or say mail from devices or monitoring systems.
nothing says this has to be an all or nothing approach. this scheme could work very well in combination with whitelisting.. as in whitelisted source addresses don't need to do the computation... of course that leads to spoofing the from address.. it will need to be necessary to make the whitelist suitably detailed so as not to allow that attack to be effective (i.e. the whitelist would be more than just the sending address.. perhaps a sender regex match and a message body regex match)
the Passats you see in the US are NOT representative of the euro market models. Re-read what i said about the passat - over there it has a much much wider variety of engine choices... all of which are lower displacement than the 2.8 offered here.
The 2.8 incidentally is not a bad motor - far from it - it makes 190hp and 203 ft/lbs, revs very freely with a near 7000 rpm limit.
Re: right to criticize -
well, its common for someone in germany with a RUF 911 or similar gas guzzling car to ride their bike to the market instead of drive the porsche. so in that sense, when people take to the roads they do so to DRIVE, not for a 5 minute start/stop cycle. The fuel costs in germany HAVE affected peoples thoughts on driving there in a way that they haven't in the US.
the basemodel passat and jetta engine is a 1.8L turbo in the states. Not a gas guzzler by any means. Nor the pinnacle of fuel economy, but all in all it is a good powerplant.
Really we'd all be better off if people were driving base model passats as opposed to escalades or grand cherokees. That may have been the point being made. Here in Fargo, essentially every vehicle is a GM with the 3800 motor. 3.8L for an uninspiring, underwhelming car seems ridiculous. That's more than some of europes most exotic super cars.
the german cars that come to the states are not representative of what most of europe is driving. only the large displacement engines make the journey over the pond do the US market. BMW has numerous 4 cylinder and diseel models but these are not seen in the states because they are not cost effective to bring here, and to a lesser extent don't support BMW's branding image of a luxuruy marque.
Similarly, the VW Passat has something like 20 engine and gearbox combinations in germany but very few here.
That said, japan makes some very fuel efficient cars. The fuel efficient ones tend to be pretty shitty in terms of sporting character, however. The typical german car doesn't suffer from this... especially the TD models.. the base turbodeisel engines in german spec vehicles are putting out similar torque to the highest performing JDM vehicles. 320nm in a subcompact TD is not uncommon, of less than 2 liters displacement.
In the USA BMW has never sold a 5 series with less than 2.5L. This is the "baby" engine here. In the 80s there was the 528e with the 2.8L "economy" motor. IN europe the idea of a 2.8L motor being "economy" or "small" is ridiculous. The same year that the USA got the 528e with 2.7L, and the 535 with 3.5L, most european markets also got a 516 with 1.6L I4, a 520 with 2.0L i4 (or i6), a 528 with 2.8L i6.
Note that all of these models are typically lighter than their US counterparts as well, (less standard options.. i.e. you could get a 7 series BMW with crank windows, and a 5 series BMW with cloth interior), which further improves fuel economy (and performance, for that matter)
VW is certainly no leader in specific output, and have some real duds in the US market (the base model 2.0 gas engine being a notable peice of garbage, in all respects). On the other hand, a comparison of JDM and euro-spec engines should take a few things into consideration
1) fuel quality and type
2) displacement
3) total output
4) specific output
5) torque profile
6) powerplant weight
i think what you'll find is that many JDM (and us imported) motors are very lacking in torque as compared to US and german counterparts. While high specific output is admirable, the difference between a 240hp Honda S2000 motor and a 240hp E36 M3 motor is more than 0hp. The M3 takes an extra liter of displacement, but rewards you with roughly 80 more ft/lbs of peak torque, and over a MUCH broader range than the S2000 motor. That is a 50% torque increase (which golly.. so is the displacement increase).
Wether or not performance, torque, flexibility, etc are important to you is up to you and your driving style. the BMW i6 is a very economical motor, given its capabilities. But nobody drives it for that reason.