October 2007 Archives

A Google page rank of 5 isn't impressive, but in the blogging community this seems to be the rank that separates the wheat from the chaff. I obtained a Google PR5 in only about three months after the blog was started, and I believe this success is based on a few deliberate "white hat SEO" choices I had made up front. These choices were, in no particular order:

1. Networking. I've found that especially StumbleUpon, Thoof, Reddit, and Fark have drawn traffic to my blog. There's also Digg, Technorati, and Del.icio.us, of course, and while you may not get traffic from those sites unless you're lucky enough to get dugg, Google will notice the links to your site.
2. Participate on message boards and other people's blogs. (This is also networking, of course.) Make shameless self-promotion with a link to an article that you wrote, or use trackbacks if the other person's blog allows them. Have a link to your blog in your signature and your profile.
   
3. Blog bait in the form of provocative articles. Don't be overly provocative (writing a pro-Nazi article will probably draw traffic, but something tells me your site might be placed in a category that won't improve your page rank), but say something that sounds profound using effective rhetoric. My article, Survival Tips: Lessons in Misanthropy quickly became a "buzz" on StumbleUpon, for example. People will share these articles and link to them.
4. Blog bait in the form of little applications, tips, and tricks. I wrote some plugins for Joomla and some plugins and hacks for Movable Type, and made them free for everyone with the license requirement that they link to my blog. Little "how-to" posts explaining how you did something in PhotoShop or on your Linux machine can also draw traffic.
   
5. Blog bait in the form of humor and satire. Readers love to be entertained.
   
6. Valuable and well-written articles. I wrote something about this in an earlier post. I'm sure you can do with less than philosophical high-brow articles, but they should provide some insight in a nice wrapping, that is, something that other people will actually look for and use. Make sure your articles include words that you anticipate people will search for. If in doubt, see which tags similar high-ranking articles have received on Technorati and other aggregator sites and use them in your posts as appropriate.
   
7. Include graphics in your articles. Google indexes the images, and I suspect they have a positive effect in Google's page ranking algorithms. In any even't, quite a few of the blog hits are caused by Google's image search.
   
8. Submit your site to the search engines. Also configure your blog ping the various blog search engines out there. (You probably knew this already.)
   

Finally, there's actually an unused number 9 in the above list that may partly explain why "Survival Tips" became so popular. It is a blog bait where you compile a list of "top-ten" or "top-fifty" (or top-anything) of whatever you choose. For example, you may visit a variety of quotes pages and copy some quotes you like on a specific topic. Then when you have the desired number of quotes, make a blog post that says "Top 50 Republican Quotes" (or, equivalently, "Top 50 Dumbest Quotes Ever") or something, and your post is probably bound to become popular. I have written a few blog posts with enumerated suggestions, but since none of them were entitled "Top-blank," I don't know how effective these top-n lists are yet.

It seems that Google is currently lowering the page ranks of sites that have paid content. As of this writing, this blog has not yet included any paid posts, and considering my plans to include paid content in the future, I can expect the page rank to drop. However, I imagine that the page ranking algorithms consider the ratio between paid content and non-paid content so I'm not too worried about that.

If you accept the fact that there are no gods, then you will also have to face the fact that it doesn't matter what a person believes in: the only thing that matters is what this person does (or doesn't) as a result of his or her belief. All that matters are the tangible results, that is, the practical implications of the belief. What matters are actions, results, and effects; but the belief itself—well, who needs to care about that, except the believers?

Sure, there are very good reasons to investigate beliefs, which are used to justify atrocities all over the world. But it's the atrocities, not the beliefs, that are the cause of concern. If the beliefs implied no harm or good, would you bother to care?

1. Never acquire an enemy you do not need.
2. Study common knowledge, then reject it.
3. Never teach your soldiers everything you know, because one day you may become your own victim.
4. To deceive an enemy, let him think you fear him.
5. Bad luck enters through the door you left open.
6. At sea, we are all brothers. But those with life jackets may be unwilling to share.
7. He that answers for others pays the bill.
8. It you must lie, be brief.
9. Always pull a snake from its hole with another man's hand.
10. Shallow waters may conceal sharks.
11. I you are forced to bow, bow deeply—and remember the bitter feeling when you take revenge.
12. Do not use both legs when you measure the depth of a river.
13. Do not use cat guts to tie a dog.
14. If you are the anvil, be patient. If you are the hammer, hit.
15. Leave a sleeping dog alone unless you have a lion in your leash.
16. Nothing weights less than a promise.
17. Never underestimate your opponent's skills, cunning, and greed. And don't overestimate them either.
18. After the war, many heroes appear.
19. If you strike at someone in anger, be careful not to hit yourself.
20. Fire can be concealed, but smoke cannot.
21. Some defeats are better than victories; unfortunately, some victories are worse than defeats.
22. In every situation, ask: "what do I gain?" Then ask: "what does he gain?"
23. Better your foes believe you are crazy than they believe you are sane and understanding.
24. He that serves two masters must lie to one of them.
25. After a victory, sharpen your knife.
26. Everyone is kind while you do not ask for help.
27. A crow drowns if it mimics a seagull.
28. No crisis is as bad as one imagines.
29. Necessity breaks all rules.
30. Living according to someone's will is misery for a few, necessary for many, and desirable for most.
31. Today's friend is tomorrow's enemy.
32. If you are never on the street, you will never learn its rules.
33. No man's credit is worth his cash payment.
34. You do not know your soldier until he becomes your lieutenant.
35. Never reveal your weaknesses.
36. Do nothing to change your enemies. Control them instead. Know where they are, what they think, and who they trust.
37. Fear is often concealed with courage.
38. It takes a thousands strike to drive a nail into a wall when it is dark.
39. Hunger turns bread to cakes and beans to steaks.
40. Set priorities. If you are up to your waist in leeches, drain the swamp.
41. Everything is quid quo pro.
42. Never think that man is guided by reason and logic.
43. A thousand friends is not enough, but a single enemy is. There is no harmless enemy.
44. Make your plans as complicated as necessary, but issue simple orders.
45. Be kind to everyone, kind to some, acquainted with few, and a friend to just a handful.
46. It is a fool that cannot hide his wisdom.
47. Your opponent is never as dangerous as you may believe. Neither are you.
48. If you want to be loved, buy a dog.
49. Better an ass that drags than a horse that throws.
50. The future is paid with the present.
51. Many have starved to death in the plentiful land of promises.
52. The fish dies for its open mouth.
53. Never judge others for what you hear about them.
54. Eagles do not chase flies.
55. When the arrow leaves the bow, it does not return.
56. If you do not recognize the mark after half an hour when you are gathered at the table, it is you.
57. Not all that snore are asleep.
58. Planning is the mother of fortune.
59. A runaway nun always speaks ill of her convent.
60. Wolves may lose their teeth but not their nature.
61. If a problem seems unsolvable, look for the woman, or the man.
62. Many come fishing, but few will bring the bait.
63. No solution will satisfy everyone.
64. Many words, many lies.
65. If you must cut, let your victim think you are a surgeon.
66. An enemy is most dangeous when he seems defeated.
67. Problems show what men are made of.

I would like to thank all Christians for loving their neighbor so much that they even extend their love to the abominable homosexuals, wishing to help them.

As a former homosexual I would like to express my gratefulness by telling the world how my membership of my Church and my belief in Christ as my savior has taught me that homosexuality is an abomination and a sin, which Jesus my savior has replaced with a love in Christ.

A liar may want to be exposed if the exposure can lead his victim to believe another, better lie. But usually the liar just wants his victim to believe what he says.

In some cases a lie is evident but in some cases you need some tools to reveal it. Fortunately, the liar often provides a number of cues that I'll teach you here. Just remember that the cues do not necessarily prove a lie, and you may also encounter a seasoned liar that can suppress them.

Body and Body Language

Many people believe that loss of eye contact and shifting of the body indicates that a person lies. However, there is no such connection. Touching one's body by wringing one's hands or scratching one's head does not indicate a lie either. (However, if you're the liar, don't expect your victim to be aware of this, so don't wring your hands.)

The body nonetheless provides a number of cues—not about lies, but about emotions. These signals include eye batting, blushing or paling, dilation of the pupils, fast or irregular breathing, increased swallowing frequency, speaking errors, mumbling, etc. It is difficult for a person to hide these signs, but they reveal a lie only if the person feels bad about lying. And they can easily occur for other reasons.

Ubuntu is out today, but as of this writing the official Ubuntu site has not yet been updated with a download option for version 7.10, the "Gutsy Gibbon" release.

You can get it, however, if you're willing to search a little on the Ubuntu Mirrors. I'm currently downloading the desktop and the server editions of Ubuntu 7.10 from a German mirror while the official Ubuntu site still only makes version 7.04 available for download. Look in the ".pool" directories.

You don't need to download a new CD if you're simply upgrading your installation. Instead, if you want to get it while it's fresh from the oven and not yet on the store shelf, you may have to update your distribution source list to point to a mirror that hosts the most recent version of Ubuntu.

I once promised myself that I would never make a stab at poetry, but sometimes you just have to use the means of communication that makes the most sense to you. If it happens to resemble poetry—then so be it.

Items in My Room

When I met you, my room was empty.
As you spoke and acted,
as you were quiet and asleep,
as you prepared food and entertained me,
as you deprived and forgot me,
as you taught me, and as you learned from me,
you decorated my room.

You put paintings on the wall,
or left a box with unassembled furniture.
Some decoration was expensive, and some was cheap.
A few items were curiosities that had value only to me.
Other items were essentials to anyone.
Sometimes you left garbage I had to clean up.

All of the items were how I knew you.
Some were your nagging habits,
and some were your great example.
They were all that I liked and disliked about you.

Then one day you shattered a beautiful vase,
one of the most precious items in my room
with an important history and a soul.
It was an accident, and you meant no harm.
You replaced it with another item,
but since then when you entered my room,
I would notice that the vase was missing
and that I had been mistaken about you.

Ingestion of holy water from Mecca can turn people Muslim. This is the amazing conclusion after subjecting holy water from Mecca to scientific tests.

A local ethnic store had a specialty for sale: genuine, holy water from Mecca. At a discount price of only $3 for a beautiful plastic amphora filled with the waters from the Holy City, the offer was too good to pass.

As sensible skeptics, we suspected that perhaps the amphora might contain nothing but simple tap water, but the store assured us that no-one would buy tap water for $3 a bottle in those quantities, and therefore the water was indeed the real thing.

We were still not entirely convinced, but the store owner added that Muslims purchased these bottles to keep in their homes as well, and that they would obviously never cheat their fellow peoples.

In addition, the Arab letters clearly described the contents of the container as holy water imported from the holy city in Saudi Arabia. There could be no doubt about its authenticity.

Thus the proud and unexpected owners of such a rarity, we began to wonder what to do with this sacriligious item. We are not Muslims, and therefore had no clue what to do with such holy water. Fortunately we don't belong to any other religion either and therefore needed not worry about going to a wrong Hell in case we misapplied the contents.

Instead, we decided to perform some experiments to see if holy water from the holy city of Mecca would demonstrate an effect different from that of regular tap water.

To begin with, we decided to water one of our plants with the holy water. The plant showed no difference in growth, except that within days the plant started to turn away from the light outside the window. Since the plant thrived, evidently the light did no harm, but it seemed very unusual for a plant to turn away from the light.


On repeating the experiment in different rooms with windows facing in different directions it became clear that the plants did indeed not turn away from the light, but instead all leaned towards the south-east of here: more specifically, in the direction of Mecca.

We had seen the first proof that the holy waters from Mecca had a distinct effect.

This sparked our interest, and we decided to go one step further and test the product on animals. We felt relatively secure that the water would not be harmful after the experiments with the plants.

We devised a test where one rat stayed on its regular diet and another rat changed from tap water to holy water. After one week, we offered the rats a piece of pork chops. Again, the result was striking. The rat that had continued to drink regular tap water immediately began to eat the piece of pork chop that we offered to it ("Before" image, indicating the original behavior). The rat that had received holy water in its water bottle showed no interest in the pork chop at all ("After" image, indicating the new behavior):


Since we know that Muslims do not eat pork, the reaction from the rat that had ingested holy water indicates a clear influence from the holy water from Mecca.

It was now time to extend the experiment to humans. Prominent members of the Danish People's Party have on several occasions compared Muslims with rats, and this might imply that rats would show a particularly positive reaction towards the holy water from Mecca. The question therefore remained: would humans react differently than rats?

We hesitated for a while but finally decided to carry out an experiment on our own children. Many leading politicians and Christian theologists have already explained that Islam turns people into fundamentalists and terrorists, and perhaps the effects of the holy water from Mecca would support their explanations.

We secretly replaced his drinking water with holy water from Mecca, and observed his reaction. After one week, we began to see patterns in his behavior that could indicate a distinctly Muslim effect, as shown in the picture to the right.

His behavior is not conclusive evidence, however, as our son may have been influenced by his parents, who are neither republican nor Christian, and we do not support the so-called war on terror.

Our final experiment is still only at the planning stage where yours truly will attempt to brew beer using the holy water from Mecca. We hypothesize that the beer will become non-alcoholic because Muslims are required to abstain from alcoholic drinks. This will be an ultimate sacrifice from me, but I am prepared to make this offer in the name of science.

If it turns out that the holy water of Mecca can indeed influence people and matter, the conclusion should cause alarm, as it means that terrorists could threaten to contaminate Western water supplies with water imported from Saudi Arabia, or perhaps already be doing it, causing an increase in fundamentalism and state terrorism in the nations whose waters are contaminated.

Candy Tothill ponders the "law of three" applied to authors and speculates whether this makes it easier to love writers. She inspired me (and I will wonder if I should not have dared to use this word once this text is complete) to add a few thoughts on the transfer of the story from the writer to the reader.

As a strict atheist, I would have preferred a less religious approach than that of the "law of three," yet I have no choice but to apply mystical words such as "soul" or "spirit" and similar symbology because inspiration, creativity, emotion, and feeling cannot be described by Aristotelian logic. I could perhaps refer to Antonio Damasio's somatic marker model, but since this model is also ontologically incomplete (as Damasio himself recognizes), this detour would eventually be wasted effort. So please bear with me on the mystical language, and try not to imagine metaphysical entities as I use mystical expressions.

Anyone is an author these days; write an incoherent article that includes a few of your darling phrases and you're an author. Change a few fonts to the worse in a premanufactured template and you're a web designer. Submit some video footage of yourself to YouTube and you're an actor and a producer. There are plenty of options for you to earn your 15 bytes of fame.

Aim higher, and you may become one of those authors that have learned the handicraft of writing, applying strong language skills, mastering composition and powerful statements, who can state some profundities and maybe even have stories to tell, yet somehow leave the reader with a feeling that he or she has just read a user's manual.

Alternatively, become a no-style writer whose specialty is simplicity in every sense of the word. It probably helps if you're a religious person or a conservative, because their views invariably tend toward the simplicity of bifurcations.

But some authors charm their readers. Their readers have experienced the captivating feeling that made it impossible to put the book aside. As a reader, you did not merely read the book. You reacted spontaneously to the story as it entered your heart. You let yourself drift in the story with no safety jacket and found yourself sometimes carried gently along and at other times rushing in a deadly torrent. It felt natural and meaningful, but barring bland explanations about a stimulated imagination or entertainment, you could not explain where the meaning was found.

If you have never known this feeling, don't bother reading on, as it will make no sense to you.

The author feels a "higher sensation" within him, call it spirit or muse, which inspires him to ideas that give structure to his composition. The author feels part of a flow, or feels an insight experience, or a love experience; it may feel as a "mystic" experience where a larger whole is perceived. It is as if separates within the author unify and opposites resolve. Anxiety, inhibition, and restraint are lost, and intellectual self-criticism, fear, and doubts about himself are left behind.

Being more himself, the author is more spontaneous and expressive, and everything is done with greater ease. Although authors excel in verbalization, they live far more in the real world than in the verbalized world of abstractions, beliefs, and concepts. They see the raw, the fresh, and the existing in addition to the abstract, the categorized, and the generic. They combine a childish ability to perceive and express with a sophisticated mind. They sense in themselves both a strong ego versus ego-less behavior, their head versus their heart, self-love versus altruism, selfishness versus unselfishness, concreteness versus abstraction, any many other apparent contradictions and polarities that others would see as dichotomies or mutually exclusive; but these people are natural integrators that synthesize separates and opposites into a larger whole. As within themselves, so without themselves, they put together forms that fight each others and combine dissonances into unity: their works of art.

It is in this experience that the art is born in a slow but intense flash of inspiration, but it also requires hard work and training. The spontaneous leads to the planned, the Dionysian to the Apollonian, the feminine to the masculine, yin to yang, or being to becoming, by any expression. We yield to the darkness of our souls for inspiration, and only then turn it to form by control, criticism, judgment, and hard work. The experience of inspiration or heightened being happens to the person, who in turn creates the art. The latter can be learned, but is heartless. The former is innate, but is headless.

And thus the spirit works through the author to manifest itself as letters on paper. Many an author can testify to feeling as if being the tool of a higher purpose.

Now the process is reversed. The letters on the paper are perceived by the reader's body, which senses the contrasts and forms and combine them to words, then sentences and continuity in the brain. The perception of the text invokes feelings and wakes emotions in the reader which collectively create a gestalt, a feeling that is more than the sum total of the individual words. This higher sensation is the story that is told, and is exactly the higher sensation that the author felt as spirit; it is a sensation that, although manifest in words, cannot be expressed in words.

You are the story while the story unfolds, and you sense the spirit that originally inspired the author. It is mind that contacts mind; it is the spirit that speaks through the author's soul to the reader's soul. You may like what you experience through the author, or you may not, and the author's soul may contain both beauty and horror.

But like rays from the sun will cause only growable things to grow, the creativity emitted from the author will be lost on rocks and other dead material. The reader without a soul will never sense the spirit.

Two years ago, Denmark became the hot topic around the world when the right-wing newspaper Jyllandsposten published twelve cartoons of the Muslim prophet Muhammad. More recently a Swedish journalist felt the predictable wrath of offended Muslims after publishing another picture of Muhammad.

Referring to "freedom of expression," Jyllandsposten waived all responsibility for the ensuing protests when it dawned upon the editors that there was a world beyond the Danish borders where Muslims were also offended. Today, hopefully it is only the most naïve individuals that still believe that the cartoons had anything to do with freedom of expression, and nothing to do with the steep increase in xenophobia and racism that Denmark has witnessed over the last thirty years. In fact, Jyllandsposten had published the cartoons in spite of being warned of the effects next to an editorial explaining that Muslims should accept ridicule, and one of the cartoonists included a hidden comment to Jyllandsposten's motivation in his drawing: in Persian, the text on the blackboard says, "The editors at Jyllandsposten are a bunch of reactionary provocateurs." Nonetheless, Jyllandsposten's editor Flemming Rose, a great fan of the intensely anti-Arab Daniel Pipes, decided to print the cartoons. It is hard to believe that Jyllandsposten was caught entirely by surprise.

Freedom of expression is only relevant to minority groups. Jyllandsposten in Denmark represents the majority which has the power, and is also a traditional and almost uncritical supporter of the right-wing government. To such a medium, freedom of expression is a moot point. The majority has the power to say what it wants, exactly because it has the power to do so. It does not need any protection or freedom to do this. Freedom of expression is a tool that protects the weak from oppression of the strong when they voice their opinions. The strong do not need this protection, and their opinions are no more covered by freedom of expression than they are covered by mob violence. (In this particular case, the newspaper received the express support of the similarly right-wing government which advocated the right to free expression while recommending that left-wing or politically centered newspapers support the government's decisions.)

Generally speaking, any picture would be covered by freedom of expression to the extent that you can ignore power-relations such as oppression or state-sanctioned vigilante justice.

Many debaters remarked that there was a certain double standard applied to the question about freedom of expression, because although we do have a more forgiving attitude towards derisive images of religious symbols in Denmark, the same newspaper has rejected comparable drawings of Jesus, various clothing has been withdrawn from stores because of a perceived blasphemy against Christianity, and the government withdrew an sex-educational CD after pressure from religious interest groups.

But there is yet another form of double standard that is less evident. Muslim demonstrations against Denmark included burnings of the Danish national flag, and the "extreme right" party, the Danish People's Party (which is no more extreme than being able to collect more than ten percent of the votes) were still advocating that freedom of expression should be defended at all cost when they proposed a legislation against burning the Danish national flag.

As a principal argument, they stated that burning a flag is material damage while a cartoon only offends people's feelings. In other words, material damage has more weight than damaged feelings.

You might be inclined to accept this argument, but only until your realize that it is an entirely different issue if it is your own feelings that are hurt. For example, when occasionally a graveyard is desecrated for some reason, the complaints always refer to the fact that although the material damages were considerable, the worst damage was that the victims' survivors felt violated.

It shows that if we are the ones that are hurt, it is our feelings that have the greatest importance compared with the material damage, so the argument that material damage is more important than feelings is not generally valid.

When burnings of the Danish national flag is compared with the Muhammad cartoons as an example of expressions that are not to be covered by freedom of expression, the argument reveals a reality where "their" feelings are considered inferior to both our tangible material and our own feelings, which in turn we consider superior to our own tangibles. It is worse to step on our feelings than it is to step on our flag, but both are much worse than stepping on others' feelings.

This view extends to patronization as well. Christians in Denmark have stated that Muslims should not be offended by the Muhammad cartoons because Christians would not be hurt by similar drawings of Jesus. If for a moment we ignore the historical facts showing that this is a blatant lie, the Christians are in fact stating that not only are Muslim feelings considered inferior to Christian feelings; Christians even reserve themselves the rights to dictate what Muslims should allow themselves to feel.

When a newspaper such as Jyllandsposten draws intentionally demeaning cartoons of Muhammad, or when Muslims burn the Danish national flag, they attack symbols, and the importance of symbols cannot be emphasized enough in this conflict. Peace negotiators know that a mutual accept of symbolic values are key to conflict resolution and, conversely, that one of the easiest ways to start a conflict is to attack the opponent's symbols.

The cartoon conflict was initiated by a Christian culture against people from a Muslim culture, who in turn reacted very strongly. The reaction did not seem directed at the drawings themselves, however, and this begs for a better explanation than religious outrage over the images of the prophet. Firstly, there are many accounts of Muslim depictions of Muhammad that did not cause uproar; secondly, many protesters had never seen the drawings and had only heard about the deliberate provocation against their culture and peoples; and thirdly, many Muslim protesters expressed their anger against the Western world rather than the drawings themselves. The drawings that originally symbolized the Danish attitude towards their Arab immigrants had now become symbols that expressed the Western world's attitude towards the Middle East both in the eyes of the West and the Middle East. Although there are religious aspects involved from both sides of the conflict, it is difficult to classify the conflict as a religious conflict when you recognize Jyllandsposten's motivation and the nature of the protests.

Perhaps the protests may have been cloaked in religious trappings because the Muhammad drawings happened to be considered blasphemous, but although the Danish People's Party's inner circle does include a number of fundamentalist Christians, their reaction against burnings of the Danish national flag can hardly be said to be clearly caused by Christian faith; this is evidence that the feelings are related to the violation of a symbol, and that the conflict is based on cultural values attributed to the symbols.

Jyllandsposten triggered a conflict that was perhaps inevitable because it is reasonable to assume that the newspaper merely reflected the general rise in Danish xenophobia and racism. However, by attacking the Muslim symbols, they showed the Danish sentiments very powerfully, and the strong support that Jyllandsposten received in the Western world shows only too clearly how the Western world views its neighbors in the Middle East. And at the same time, the drawings became a symbol to the Middle East that illustrated their frustration with the Western world.

Assume you a set of files that you wish to post on the binary newsgroups; for example, a CD or a DVD with hundreds of Mbytes or maybe several Gbytes of data. There are a variety of applications that can do that for you, but sometimes it's convenient to use command line tools. (You'll need Linux for this.)

1. Install RAR. Just download the Linux distribution and unpack it. It contains an executable named "rar."
2. Install par2cmdline. I wasn't able to get the binary files to run on my system, and the source code wouldn't compile until I wrote this patch. Apply it to reedsolomon.cpp in the source code directory with "patch < par2cmdline.patch," and it will probably work.
3. Install cksfv.
   
4. Install newspost.

Some of these tools can be installed via apt-get.

You'll get three kinds of files to post: RAR archive files, PAR2 parity files, and an SFV checksum file. You should probably decide on a similar file name for each kind of file such as "mypost.rar", "mypost.par2", and "mypost.sfv".

The first thing you do is to compress the files and limit their size. You're about to spend a whole lot of bandwidth soon, so compress them tightly. In the following example, rarfilename is the name of the RAR output file (without the ".rar" extension), and the following files are the ones to be added to the archive. The example produces an archive that is split for every 50 Mbytes, includes recovery records, and applies maximum compression:

rar a -rr -m5 -v50000 rarfilename file1 file2 file3 ... filen

Next, expect errors on the news servers. Create so-called PAR2 recovery files containing at least 10% redundant information as follows. Again, omit the ".par2" extension from the PAR2 file name.

par2create -r10 -s262144 parfilename *.rar

As an optional step, you may want to create an SFV file with CRC-32 checksums for the posted files.

cksfv *.rar *.par2 > sfvfilename.sfv

You now have the compressed and split archive, recovery blocks for when the news servers around the world don't replicate the posts correctly, and a checksum file. Now it's time to post. yourusername and yourpassword may be required by your news server, but otherwise you may omit those switches. You can specify that the files are to be cross-posted to several newsgroups by separating the newsgroups with a comma; e.g., "-n alt.binaries.dvd,alt.binaries.dvdr". Everything else is hopefully self-explanatory:

newspost -i news.yournewsserver.com -u yourusername -p yourpassword \
  -f your@email.address -F "Your Name" -n alt.binaries.test \
  -s "Subject of the post" -q -y *rar *par2 *sfv

Now go get a cup of coffee. Or go to bed if your archive is several Gigabytes large, because your files are now posted to the news server.

The first time around, try the above with just a few small files, and use alt.binaries.test to verify that your files are posted. Oh, and limit the amount of cross-posting so you don't post your home videos to all of the erotica binary newsgroups.

If you know of similar tools that can be used to achieve the same effects, please let me know. I'm mostly interested in alternatives to par2cmdline and newspost.

I know that I can't prove a negative, and atheists in general feel caught by a "democratic" need to acknowledge that since you can't fully disprove the chance, however small, that there might be some god somewhere, you must acknowledge that the delusional claims about such entities may at least in principle have some merit.

I do not acknowledge that merit, except as a mental exercise that one can do for fun if one feels so inclined, however, because in spite of my disbelief in metaphysical beings, I'm not an atheist.

The non-belief of atheism is easy, and you can get a long way with that. I know that all things in this vast universe are ultimately connected, but as little as I consider how it affects the red spot on Jupiter that I mow my lawn, consistently with the aforementioned atheists I don't consider the remote chance of something even less observable influencing my thoughts either.

It is easy to not believe, yet atheists seem stuck at searching for the turning point, where God has diminished enough in life's equation, to feel comfortable stating why they move on without him. I have never had anything to discuss with superstitious people, and have never wanted to debate with them.

I am beyond that point. I am beyond atheism: not only do I not believe there is a God, I believe there is no God.

Taking this step beyond atheism has important ramifications. Believing there is no Heaven or Hell, I have no doubt, not even at the level of academic agnosticism, that I cannot be forgiven or damned. This belief requires me to be thoughtful of my actions instead. It requires me to understand that how I treat people will reflect back on me within this lifetime. Believing there is no God means believing there is no supernatural purpose of my life, and that this is the only life I have; it is up to me to make the most of it, and now is the only chance I have.

Believing that there is no God means that I cannot assume that others will view the world the way I do. I have no god to instruct me how reality is, and I must reach a consensus with human beings instead. I must learn, and I must teach.

I believe that no suffering or joy is caused by an omnipresent force that bothers to test or help me. It is caused by chance and our own actions, and the belief implies that misfortune is something that I and my fellow specimens must deal with on our own rather than relying on that force to correct. We are responsible for our own actions; no God will reward us, and no Devil will punish us. We cannot expect God to fix our mistakes, and we cannot blame the Devil for them, believing that the former will forgive us for doing it, and that the latter made us do it.

Believing there's no god places a huge set of demands on me that a mere atheist wouldn't consider. Atheists act as if they still believe in that God, stuck with the same morals and ethics, believing in the same values, acting according to the same rules as those they think they've disaffiliated themselves from, and following the same religiously motivated traditions, ceremonies, and rituals as most other Christians.

I believe that we are not creatures bound by fate or supernatural decision, but I also believe that we do not roam free. I believe there is a trinity (if one dares to use such a term) of diamond hard necessity, fleeting hazard or chance, and freedom, and each individual's life is a trajectory throughout existence bouncing off these opposing and yet balancing elements of this trinity on every move.

Diamond necessity are the unescapable laws of nature and environment that limit our movement; death is an ultimate limit, but the less obvious limits imposed upon us by our biology and psychology are also only too real to us. It is within this imprisonment of being that we may wish to become distinguishable, which is a way to seem to avoid hard necessity.

But within these limitations set in stone, fleeting hazard occurs, much like a lottery or a fatal car crash coming out of nowhere. We may hope for or dread the results, but we can never plan or prevent them, and where diamond necessity destroys all hope of change, fleeting hazard is the chaos in the ordered necessity, the nonsense in the sense, that no-one would wish to be without.

And finally, there is freedom: as lightnings of hazard tear through the shadows of solid necessity, we observe that we are not automatons of an imagined fate. We revolt against diamond necessity wishing to control the chaotic chance, wondering if we are challenging the impossible. We instinctively wish to break free from stasis, to progress, and the more content one is with stasis, the more one is inclined to view this rebellion as evil. Yet while freedom is felt instantly, the freedom that bends diamond necessity takes an eternity to unfold compared with the lifespan of a single human being.

I turn the theist safety around. Much better than thinking it safest to believe in God "just in case," I find it safer to believe there is no God. There is so much self-denial, so much atonement, so much guilt, and so much rejection of life's joys at risk that the slim chance of avoiding the right Hell among so many variants cannot possibly warrant the effort. But I also prefer the safety of treating people according to my needs, to gain for my purposes, to trust skilled authorities, to get sound advice, and I wish to live in a society where my personal safety is based on responsibilities laid in the hands of the responsible.

It is not enough to renounce the gods, the heavens, and the hells. You must face the consequences: if there is no heavens, gods, hells, and devils, what have you? It is easy to sell your soul to the Devil, because souls are cheap. There's a much higher price to pay than your soul: it is that you recognize your own values to live your life to the fullest, here and now. Take this step, or remain forever within the clutches of religion where you pay homage to the God in which you claim disbelief.

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Like Windows XP and 2000, and the Windows versions of a decade ago, Windows Vista came on the market and seemed strangely beta-like, and keeping tradition, Vista has placed so tall demands on the computer's hardware that your computer would be slowed to a crawl unless it sported an unreasonable amount of RAM and graphics acceleration.

Many users have been either too annoyed by Vista's so-called user-friendliness or its poor hardware utilization that they have been tempted to downgrade to Windows XP, even if their newly purchased PC was still state of the art and well above the minimum requirements cited by Microsoft.

And were they in for a surprise, especially if they had bought a notebook computer. They would soon realize that no XP compatible drivers were available for the brand new network chip, graphics card, or sound chip. Some had luck finding back-ported drivers on the web, but many were forced to reinstall Vista on their computer.

The reason is obvious: notebook vendors have an incentive to use hardware that works only together with Windows Vista, because today it's hard to find a computer that doesn't include a pre-installed version of Vista. It would only imply increased costs if the hardware vendors had to develop drivers for XP as well.

This article is based on an article by Amina Olander Lap. It explains the common errors of what might be referred to as "American atheism" and proposes a foundation for sound criticism. The text addresses the common atheist attitude towards the Christian beliefs, but the discussion applies to any religion or belief system.

Buzzword Criticism

The atheism that is found in the US is the kind of atheism that can be expected in a country where religion is widespread and deeply ingrained in the population's minds. It's the kind of atheism that considers the religious people stupid, and nonetheless takes the debates onto the religious turf where the believers have the edge. "Celebrity atheist" Richard Dawkins represents this kind of atheism.

The critical view on Christianity is one thing that virtually all atheists can agree on, but the criticism is not always well targeted.

Part of the reason that the criticism often misses the point is that many atheists copy the slogans of famous atheists and the rhetoric of old philosophers, and this can easily place the criticism out of context. People often misunderstand the original meaning behind the powerful statements.

Another problem with anti-Christian slogans is a confusion between personal opinions and what can be accepted as valid arguments based on factual evidence, valid methods, and logic.

It requires no background study or field knowledge to consider Christians stupid, but if you want to propose a generally valid criticism of specific Christian teachings or historical actions, then you must keep your facts straight and your arguments tight. Otherwise you'll soon find yourself being wrong on several accounts, rendering you the ignorant person, which probably isn't what you had in mind.

Modern Christianity without God and Bible

It is Christianity itself that gave birth to the critical view of religion, and it is Christianity that mostly eliminated the concept of a highly present and tangible God by means of philosophy and theology. God was once seen as the architect of plagues and master of miracles but is now mostly viewed as a somewhat nebulous entity with an influence that escapes definition. The Christian God has become a remote God that can no longer be seen and heard.

But in so doing, Christianity has also created a refuge for superstition which Christianity today shares with all kinds of religions and spirituality. The distinction between knowledge and faith has not only banned religion from science, it has also sealed the borders of religion from science, and its mythical inhabitants can neither be proven or destroyed by scientific evidence or philosophical arguments. The Christian God may have been weakened, but has found a safe haven in a metaphysical realm beyond the reach of science, logic, arguments, and philosophy.

Once a reference for the framework of society, religion has become one of many contributors to each individual's view of life and ethics, and its relevance is a question of personal choice. The contributions from religion are usually found as segments that require little or no involvement from the individual. The idea of "all or nothing" doesn't suit modern man; if something "feels right," then it is used. Bible study and church attendance is replaced with the daily horoscope, numerology, and magical beliefs in the power of healing and homeopathy, but no one feels any less Christian about that. This is the kind of Christianity that is found in my country.

Atheists are used to the common Christian mistake of portraying atheists as immoral, destructive, and subversive, and have often heard Christians contend that atheism would lead to the horrors of communism or Nazism, referring to their atheistic stances. (It is known that Hitler originally considered himself a Christian and later became critical of Christianity as he began to believe in a "higher being," but this certainly does not make him an atheist!) Yet it is the very same mistake atheists make when they renounce Christianity, believing or claiming that all of Christianity is like that of fundamentalist minorities, or that it is, or should be, like the Christianity of ages long past. Such an approach is ideological or religious, and makes sense only to the "initiates" of the sub-culture that defines this proprietary view.

Silly Superstition

Many claims of divine cause have been either refuted or become irrelevant by the natural sciences of physics, chemistry, and biology. In addition, since Christians are fully aware why other gods do not exist, one would think them capable of applying the same rules to their own belief.

Hence, a Christian must be stupid to believe in the superstitious nonsense of entities that do not exist, some atheists argue. The entire religion is patently absurd in its reliance on metaphysics and miracles. Indeed, if anyone else made similarly outrageous claims, one would probably be stupid, or at least immensely gullible, to believe in them.

It is tempting to rely on the natural sciences to show better explanations than divine intervention, but since Christians themselves have debated what their god is and isn't for centuries and evidently become none the wiser in terms of belief, it will not help to thus further refine the image of their god.

The key is that the existence of the Christian god, the credibility of the miracles, and the veracity of the myths are entirely moot points as arguments against Christianity. Christians would disagree strongly on this issue, of course, but considering the nature of their other claims, one would hardly be wise to take their word for that.

One should instead take the word of the fields of science that study religions and religious people: sociology and psychology. These sciences teach us that Christianity, like any religion, encompasses a variety of feelings, morals, ethics, social structures, and paradigms. It is a frame of reference that helps organize one's perception of the world. The god is merely the "team mascot" of this frame of reference that is attributed great importance but in reality has very little to say, even if a team can be rather hysteric about its mascot.

It means that a person can be highly intelligent, as indeed some Christians are, and yet believe in mythical creatures and divine miracles, because this belief is the "executive summary" of the way they perceive the world. The belief in the divinity does not make any difference to his Weltanschauung; the belief is just an expression of his communication and systematization of his perception of the world.

For example, the concept of a Last Judgment should be recognized as an abstraction that summarizes some set of moral values and the belief that morals are intrinsic to the universe and cannot be escaped. A Christian may honestly believe that the abstraction exists, but since it is not the abstraction itself but rather the concept of moral it encompasses that is important, it makes no difference to this Christian if any number of predicted judgment days have passed unnoticed. The same Christian will be setting aside money for his children's college in spite of the impending doom that he believes in. It seems hypocritical, but it isn't: it is just his "language," and it is his morals that guide him through the day, not the anticipation of the Last Judgment.

Often the person can easily acknowledge inconsistencies between his belief and physical evidence, and yet believe in both, because religion encompasses an orthogonal set of issues to him which are in fact not contradicted by any physical evidence. A baseball team will abandon neither the mascot nor their game if you inform them that their team mascot is just a dressed-up actor, and the religious person will not leave his god behind either, because challenging the mascot has nothing to do with the game.

It follows that the many failed returns of Christ, the questions of whether God cares, or other such matters, are also irrelevant, except to a few fundamentalists.

Finally, both atheists and Christians agree that a miracle and supernatural events or beings are defined as impossible events and beings. The Christian can be fully knowledgeable in any field of science, and may happily embrace any natural explanation. To this Christian, miracles are miracles because they are not covered or governed by science and the laws of nature.

Biblical Errors

It is another common criticism of Christianity that the religion cannot be taken seriously because errors and contradictions in their Bible abound. If Christians insist on their faith in the light of glaring errors, then either it must be a result of ignorance or downright stupidity, the argument goes. But like before, stupidity is not the issue.

It is evident that the Bible includes its share of issues that are contradicted by today's science, issues that clash with modern moral, and passages that contradict each other. But, it requires a number of presumptions that one must be aware of to use this fact as reason to reject Christianity as a valid religion.

One must presume that Christians really believe that the Bible is of such holy character that it cannot be riddled with errors or omissions. If this were true, the argument would be valid. However, it is only a diminutive minority of Christians that deny the presence of errors in the Bible. Also, many of the biblical problems emphasized by American atheists are moral and ethical issues with the Old Testament laws, which according to Christian teachings were rendered obsolete by the inception of Christianity and thus do not apply to Christianity.

So, when atheists hold Christians accountable for biblical errors, not only do the atheists choose a theological approach that they share only with Christian fundamentalists, they also demonstrate lacking knowledge of the actual Christian use of the Bible.

A better approach to the Bible question is, again, to apply sociology. By recognizing Christianity as a religion, we can categorize it and analyze it using the tools for analyzing any other religion. We know that religion, and hence Christianity, needs no scientific proofs or elaborate philosophical arguments to fulfill its role as Weltanschauung for religious people. We know that, on the contrary, religion exists without these things. We know that religion deals with concepts that cannot be proven or rejected within the scientific framework. We know that it makes no sense to counter religious people with arguments that don't apply to religion.

The Bible is a very old Historical document, and it is not meaningful to discuss such a document by modern scientific and ethical standards. If nonetheless a biblical discussion is desired, then it is relevant to consider the fact that although Christians have used the same scripture for more than a millennium, the text has been interpreted widely different and used for highly different reasons throughout the ages. This means that as a critic, one can reject the statement that the Bible has a univocal message, and one can reject the statement that today's use is any more valid than those of the past.

Christians may also be challenged on the fact that they appropriate some sections of the Bible and leave others out according to personal taste; for example, the Bible's condonation of slavery is ignored today. This selective use of passages from the scriptures shows that the Christians themselves decide what is right and wrong rather than relying on their God's supposed authority on those matters: it is evidence that Christianity is only what Christians make of it. Like the wooden idols of long ago, it is the work of human hands.

The Murky Waters of Morals

Another common idiom states that knowledge is better than faith, and that religion therefore should be replaced with science.

It is certainly important to insist on knowledge within the cores of science, but the situation becomes complicated when one debates morals or discusses issues such as scientific ethics. Science can tell us much about our world, but it cannot explain how to live in it or what to think of it. Even if atheists attempt to find support in science, atheism is just as man-made as any other philosophy, religion, and ideology. Science and ideology cover distinct and mostly non-overlapping fields, and the atheist that claims that moral is derived from scientific data proves himself or herself unable to recognize which fields are covered by science and which fields are covered by ideology.

It is also worth noting that the atheists that are the most aggressive proponents of scientific superiority over the stupid spiritualists are often people that react ideologically rather than scholarly. One often finds atheists that on one hand consider themselves superior to those that believe in the Bible, but on the other side have a faith in science that is equally characterized by blind faith in authority, cultural background, and habit. They may be more right than the religious people, but their understanding and insight is not necessarily any greater. These atheists were just plain lucky to have more enlightened teachers.

A proper approach to moral questions must be the denial of objective truths that are independent of human beings, and one must deny religious statements as authoritative, that is, as statements that one should necessarily conform to. This does not imply that religious people are disqualified in social debates or as masters of their own lives, unless one wishes to (and is able to!) deny them their right of personal choice and personal opinion.

Modern Criticism

The above discards much of the present criticism of Christianity as obsolete, as it refers to a form of Christianity that does not exist. Today's Christianity is such a rubbery and vague concept that it is difficult to construct a modern and fitting criticism of the religion itself.

That does not mean that criticism per se has become obsolete. It only means that criticism must adapt as Christianity changes. Our most important task is not to denounce Christianity for what it was, or what it is among a few fundamentalists, but to remind people of what Christianity is not.

It is not relevant to discuss the veracity of the myths, the authenticity of the gospels, or the existence of God. Christianity must instead be challenged on its effect on society. If you were discussing Santa Claus, you would know it has no impact to conclude that Santa Claus cannot visit each home in the world within hours, and that the only issue worth debating and studying is what the myth of Santa Claus means to, says about, or impacts our culture. This is also the case for the Christian beliefs.

We must prevent Christians from claiming that Christianity and Western culture are synonymous. Christianity has played an important role in our History, but Christianity is neither the only nor an undebatedly positive or constructive contributor to our culture. Christianity itself has been influenced and changed many times since its conception as a Jewish sect. Greek philosophy, Roman schools, humanism, science, philosophy, and art have made significant contributions that have shaped both culture and Christianity itself, more often in spite of Christianity than because of it.

We must also remind Christians that although they may preach peace and love, the belief has not prevented Christian nations from declaring wars or performing massacres, not even to victims that were Christians, too. History has ample evidence that Christianity is no guarantee that individuals or states behave sensibly or humanely, and that a meek and humble Christian is a rare sight.

Atheists have no need to declare a war on God. The Christians themselves defanged their God long ago. But more than ever, we need watchdogs to keep a watchful eye on Christianity to prevent it from appropriating undeserved credit, and that requires a level of criticism that is founded on skill and knowledge rather than personal feelings.