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Bleeping spammers

Monday, 07 April 2008 16:13 Pat Lashley
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Today I'm being buried in non-deliverable mail notices. All for messages that were NOT sent by me or from my site. Nope, I'm the victim of some arsehole spammer who has forged my address in the From field of his messages.

This proves a few things about spammers. First, they don't care whether the addresses they send to are valid or not; and will make no attempt to remove bad ones from their lists. Second, they don't care who they inconvenience or how badly. Third, they know that what they are doing is wrong and attempt to make others look guilty of their crimes.

And of course it doesn't help that most email admins are stupid enough to believe the headers on spam that they're bouncing. Or that they bounce spam and undeliverable messages instead of rejecting them at SMTP time.

But what really annoys me is that there are enough stupid people to fall for the spammers' scams that spamming is still profitable. And that there are idiots who don't care if their machine is part of a botnet.

If I had some way of identifying the spammer, I would have them charged with identity theft and forgery; and would sue them for defamation of character. Examination of the headers of the bounced messages might identify which botnet is being used; but if security researchers knew who was behind it; they would already be arrested...

Last Updated ( Monday, 07 April 2008 16:36 )
 

Intelligent Design is an Insult to God

Friday, 28 March 2008 01:55 Pat Lashley
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First, let's admit it; Intelligent Design is just a branch of Creationism. When arguing for ID in our school curricula, the proponents will claim that the Designer need not be a diety; but be honest, have you every met anyone who believed in ID but did not believe that the Designer was God? Specifically, the God of the fundamentalist Christians? I thought not. (If you do happen to believe that; then how did your Designer(s) get to be so intelligent and capable without being products of ID? And if it/they didn't need ID; why do we?)

The basic premise of ID is that there are some features of humanity (and for some believers, other higher animals) that could not have happened through random mutation and natural selection. I'm not going to try to list any of those features because they keep changing as scientists prove that various things could easily have arisen through natural causes. So, basically, the claim is that God was such a piss-poor Designer that It had to keep tweaking things to get the result It wanted. Which means that ID believers must believe that God is not omniscient and omnipotent. (Or, of course, that It chose not to exercise those facilities for reasons that are beyond our understanding. A wonderful bit of hand-waving that means "You've caught me in a logical contradiction; but I'm going to ignore it instead of reexamining my beliefs.")

It seems to me that a really good Designer would be able to come up with a handful of basic fundamental constants such that a universe based on them would of necessity produce the sentient, sapient life forms desired. And that having created such a universe, It would then just sit back and let it develop according to Plan.

I'm not sure that a diety that needs to meddle is worthy of worship.

- Reverend Patrick Michael Lashley, Universal Life Church