The Jewish God (Old Testament) is angry and spends most of his time smiting people. The Christian God (New Testament) is mostly sweetness and light.

If you search the internet, you’ll discover lots of Christian apologetics trying to explain this difference. That’s just proof that the differences are so profound that Christians need to do mental calisthenics to reconcile the stories. In other words, the stories are clearly contradictory. If you view them rationally and dispassionately, you can only conclude that the God characters are clearly two different critters.

I’m interested in this comment. Please can you elaborate?

I also find it funny how those like knuckle-head (or whatever his name is) purport to be scientifically-inclined, but can’t construct a grammatically correct and correctly spelled sentence. What are they teaching in US schools these days – ID?

KA

Most of the problems of the world are, and always have been, caused by religion. Mankind will never truly be free until the black yoke of religion is lifted by the clear light of truth and rational thinking.

Microsoft offers a free antivirus now (and it’s good — it’s the same engine as the Forefront engine). But they can’t bundle it with Windows for fear of antitrust litigation from McAfee, Symantec, et al. Damn shame.

how do these guys get money to run the servers that send the spam?

Like I said, they don’t. The established spammers mostly use botnets of hijacked PCs. Here’s an article at Techrepublic about that.

Doing a gazoogle on spam conversion rate, I found a PDF from Berkeley doing an analysis on the conversion rate. They admit there are flaws in the study, as they only had access to a single data point (one they controlled), but they found the following…

After 26 days, and almost 350 million e-mail messages, only 28 sales resulted — a conversion rate of well under 0.00001%. Of these, all but one were for male-enhancement products and the average purchase price was close to $100.

Not surprising that the product that actually sold were penis pills (us men are so gullable), but at that fantastically low conversion rate, how do these guys get money to run the servers that send the spam?

The only thing I can think of is that they are basically running a scam on those who use their spamming service to sell their product. And then the rest of us have to deal with the very expensive mess.

Link to the PDF. I just skimmed. It’s only 12 pages long, but christ academic types are wordy. I nearly fell asleep halfway through the abstract.

http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/2008-ccs-spamalytics.pdf

Seriously though, yes, the process from the harvesting of addresses to the transmission of mail is pretty much automated. Most transmissions take place via botnets of hijacked PCs (mostly Windows), unseen by their owner, or from unreachable almost-lawless countries such as China and Russia. I also suspect that there are relatively few active megaspammers- perhaps just a few dozen. At least they all seem to use the same online shopping software.

Because it costs them zilch, and a sucker’s born every 1 minute and 38.22 seconds, it’s a safe venture even if they don’t make much money off of it.