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Slashback: Pop-Ups, Books, Qmail
What's your idea of feel-good literature? A few weeks ago, an Ask Slashdot question was posed about the greatest dystopic novels, and quite a few people weighed in with their choices for visions of the post-nuclear, post-germ-warfare, post-natural disaster or otherwise blighted future.
Now reader itwerx wants the other side: "That "Dystopic novels?" Ask Slashdot was so darn depressing we need a counter balance! Let's hear what novels of utopia may not be widely known."
It's certainly widely known, but I'll start the bidding with Atlas Shrugged.
The best revenge is living well, and gluing spammers end-to-end. RealDhar writes "Hey, just thought I'd let folks know that, inspired by the recent article about Paul Graham's Bayesian spam filter work, I went and wrote one for qmail. Please check it out!"
What took so long? Pop-up ads are no fun. iVillage cut them out, AOL swears they're cutting back, and even Netscape 7 can be wrangled to block them. An anonymous reader writes "From the Associated Press (via Salon): EarthLink Inc. said Monday it plans to offer its subscribers software to block Internet pop-up advertisements as part of a wider campaign to set itself apart from competitors. The full story is here.."
Penguins and picnics go well together. ArtEnvironment writes "Besides today's 2nd California Linux Anniversary Picnic previously mentioned, there will also be PLUS, the Philadelphia Linux/Unix Symposium which is the 2nd annual East-Coast Linux anniversary picnic and more, including a bar night kicking off Friday the 23rd, a free computer/electronics swap meet and giveaway on Saturday the 24th, and of course the picnic on Sunday the 25th. Also included is one of the well-known PLUG GPG Keysigning parties. PLUS will be an annual grass-roots event, but it 'won't be big and professional like' ALS or LWCE. ;)"
I look forward to the final, triumphant mention of this :) Qbertino writes "The Blender Fund, established a month ago in order to buy the IP of the 3D Pakage Blender and, at last, GPL it, has accumulated 90K Euro (90K$) of the required 100K in less than 4 weeks. As it indicates on the Website, Ton Roosendahl, father of Blender, is preparing to release the sources which should happen within the next week or so. Time for a Blender icon on /."
Version of what I call the "James P. Hogan Utopia" show up in a number of his novels. Among them are: Paths to Otherwhere, The Multiplex Man, Return to Tomorrow.
-Rob
I have two procmail rules which work wonders in stopping spam. the first one is a fairly uninventive but nevertheless effective check of a really great RBL. The second is a bit more inventive. By pulling the 'Recieved' headers from the message and comparing the countries the mail was routed through using 'GeoIP' you can make some assumptions about the route. For example. if the sending machine is in the US, relays the mail through Korea, then the mail comes back to the US such an inefficent route can be safely assumed as intended to take advantage of an open SMTP relay... Enjoy!
procmailrc.antispam.txt
-- Greg
Slashdot, would a spell-checker for posting be too much to ask? It's not rocket science!
Then you turn it over to a collection agency. When they manage to collect you get like 50% of it or something, and if they can't track down the guy or he has no assets, it doesn't cost you anything.
Or you can try to track them down yourself and put a lien on their property, but that's a lot of work.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Leto
I use Bayden PopupPopper. I've tried them all, and found this one to be the least resource intensive. When a site attempts a pop-up, you get a small transparent window that asks you if you want to add this domain to your friends list, blacklist it, or to allow/deny just that popup. It also has a cool feature that will block all popups if you turn on Scroll Lock (Finally a good use for the key, since like Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS, circa 1980s!) Oh yeah, free as in beer.
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski
Unfortunately utopian novels tend not to make very good novels.
Compare Aldous Huxley's dystopian Brave New World to his later utopia, Island. Moral ambiguity is replaced by self-righteousness, the bitter irony of the "savage" who represents an alternative world-vision in BNW is replaced by the one-sided Theosophists who form the opposition in Island. And the soul-killing drug, "soma," is replaced by the enlightening "moksha medicine," without any very convincing explanation of what makes one drug better than another.
Or compare H.G. Wells's classic early works, starting with the speculative dystopia of The Time Machine, with his preachy late utopia, The Shape of Things to Come.
Or read some of the classic socialist utopias of the late nineteenth century, Morris's News From Nowhere or Bellamy's Looking Backward. No plot, no conflict, just the slow exposition of the author's vision for a new world, along with castigation of the stupidity or greed of those among the author's contemporaries who did not share his vision.
Books about the process of creating utopia tend to be somewhat better; I enjoyed Wells's In the Days of the Comet, and Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is something of a classic, describing the fight to create a libertarian society on the moon. But that class of books allows for direction and struggle in a way that pure utopian novels do not.
Ursula K. LeGuin's _The_Dispossessed_ is IMHO one of the best Utopian novels in print; especially since it avoids the flaws so many have already pointed out, namely, vociferous self-righteousness and non-existent human struggle.
In a nutshell: physics genius from ascetic, cooperative anarchy on a quasi-prison planet travels to hedonistic, fragmented neighbor planet to revolutionize science across the galaxy.
That summary is just SO inadequate...
-ELfSi tibi te corpus pulchrum habere narrem, habeasne id contra me?
There are many people who don't know about popup-blockers. Joe and Jane SixPack, living in Farmtown, Minnesota, simply don't know anything different. "That's just the way it is, isn't it?" 500,000 usernames are subscribed to Slashdot. That leaves only 99,500,000 other internet users.
When Earthlink comes around and says "We promise no more pop-ups" this can actually awaken something within them that says "Hey, what a good idea. I'd pay for that." So they do.
Over 90% of the users have EVERYTHING default on their PCs.
John
Wasn't Moon just a riff on the American Revolution, updated for the space age? Admittedly, the Founding Fathers didn't attack Britain directly, but that was probably due to lack of opportunity given the technology of the time.
I read it in that sense because it seemed to fit with Heinlein's weird libertarian-fascist love of pioneers, and it seemed to be pretty thickly laid on, even down to using the Fourth of July etc.
deus does not exist but if he does
"Dispossessed," by Ursula Le Guin. A lot of her work could be called utopian/dystopian, but this book is the one that really changed my personal views of what our world should be like.
Here are my favorites, with political viewpoints that range from conservative to libertarian to anarchist to socialist:
Utopias are becoming more important as people become more powerful (e.g., computers, genetics, potential global prosperity), since the future is going to be largely be something we create rather than just witness. This makes dystopias more important too, but as cautionary tales rather than defeatist predictions.
Another novel I like that contains all the elements -- a utopia, a dystopia, and our present time (that will determine which path is taken) -- is Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Pearcy
Heh, you're right, that isn't the best one to try first off. I'd try "Number of the Beast", "Stranger in a Strange Land" and "Time Enough for Love", in approximately that order.
Heinlein always was a dirty old man, a male chauvinist pig and a bit of a bigot, with somewhat humorous/pitiful attempts to (over)compensate for these shortcomings in his books.
However, he was a hell of a talented writer with a much broader vision than most sci-fi authors of his day and he also had to write for a society which (believe it or not) was a heck of a lot narrower minded then than it is now. If you can look past the shadows his own flaws cast on his writing you can discover some real works of art.
As a college senior I did an independent study course on Utopias. Here's the ones I remember referencing off the top of my head:
Utopia - Thomas Moore
Dispossessed - Ursula K. LeGuin
Ecotopia - Ernest Callenbech (sp?)
Looking Backward - Edward Bellamy
City of God - St. Augustine
The Republic - Plato
State and Republic - V.I. Lenin (not a utopia per se, but an example of someone trying to implement one in the real world...).
There are a lot of utopias that are not central the book they're in, but are there nonetheless. An obvious one that spring to mind is the Lotus-Eaters in Homer's Odyssey. Mythology has an abundance of them: Shangri-La? Xanadu? Atlantis?
Many of these are a little more historical than the ones I've seen posted so far. In many of them what you're reading is the author trying to tell you that they've figured out what society should be like, and postulating that if we all ran out and implemented their proposed society we'd have heaven on earth. Half the fun of reading them is figuring out whether they will work, or why they won't.
"Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?"