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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 /."
Try The Proxomitron. I works 95% of the time and it's free. Kills both pop-ups and on-page ads. It even stops Flash and gif animations if you want. More options than you can shake a checkbox at. Try it, you'll like it.
>> Practice Safe Hex
He's a damn Objectivist.
Ceci n'est pas un post
Seriousuly, her utopia is not only deeply flawed, but her writing sucks. I mean, come on, did anyone really buy into those 20-minute long monologues that folks like D'Anconia have at dinner parties while everyone stands in silence and listens to his tedious diatribes?
The Fountainhead was much better (Rand was able to resist her temptation to "tell" not "show" a bit better), but even that work was deeply flawed, both from a literary perspective and from a philosophical one. Still inspiring in many ways, but seriously flawed.
She was rejected by 40 publishers for a reason.
I have no problem subscribing to the "less government" view of the world, but Objectivism is strictly out.
Hey,
The Bayesian filtering method seems very promising to me. However, I am a person who gets a lot of spam and relatively little "real" email (I used to use email all the time before IM prorgams).
Now if I were to give it thousands of spam a week to learn from, and maybe 1 real email or so to learn from, won't the spam language eventually just outweigh all the good language?
Either way, it seems spammers can just tack enough "goodie" words at the end of their email to outweigh the marketing speak they had in the original. Or just use JPEGS for HTML enabled clients..
I was about to post an Ayn rant (anti) and lost hope during the middle of it.
Let it just be said that this Romantic tried to call her poor justifications objectivity for a good reason... to hide the lack of any internal coherency. At least half the people that "like" her simply don't understand her and buy the surface level rhetoric of libertarean objectivity. She hated Libertarians, She was not Objective ("objectivity" for her refers to the cold hard outlook, the ability to step over a homeless person, not in the scientific sense of subjecting one's hypothesis to doubt and test). Nietzsche is a much better way to spend your youthful rebellion against the herd. Rand is a waste of time. You can still step over homeless people without having to deify yourself to justify it. Hell, you can even help them if you like. (Not for rand, her not-for-profit organization doesn't believe in charity, volunteerism or, for that matter, not-for-profit endeavor!) There is no more humourously self-refuting organization or philosophy on earth, I believe.
She simply was justifying why men that rise to the top of the capitalist world, like Ken Lay, are a better sort of people, period.
Rand is actually quite dangerous, I think. She represents an anti-rationalism which is always a key ingredient in fascism.
Dang, I did the rant.
Firstly, all his arguments are against today's common resolutions. When viewed at a half-metre away a 6000x6000 resolution screen would be as detailed as most people can perceive, so there you start to see the limits of his complaint. Now we don't have those types of screens yet, and that should be his complaint. Anti-aliasing itself is perfectly valid, it's the combination of low-resolution and static images that should be blamed, but Joel always uses a wide brush.
Secondly he writes saying that those who like anti-aliasing don't realise how it's blurry. That they're the blind zealot. He creates a weak person and then victoriously knocks them down. The nature of anti-aliasing is blurring. Everyone knows this. More accurately however it's the averaging of detail - as if the scene was rendered at many times the resolution and then scaled down to fit.
He heaps praise on the Microsoft Typography group for 'noticing' that pixels are the units to build fonts out of. In saying so he either ignores or is ignorant of fonts that don't anti-alias at lower resolutions because of their rendering, and the concept of font-hinting which existed long before Microsoft existed.
I've been reading the various rants about Ayn Rand, objectivism, capitalism, Ken Lay and so on. A few have described Ken Lay as the ultimate capitalist in an attempt to discredit capitalism, Ayn Rand and objectivism. The problem with this association is that Ken Lay was a crook, not a capitalist, and certainly not typical of the protagonists in Atlas Shrugged. If anything, he is probably more similar to the antagonists of that book, for example James Taggert, with his treachery, greed, dishonesty, and manipulation. There is a vast difference between trying to make a lot of money (capitalism) and trying to make a lot of money by stealing it (Ken Lay). Nowhere in Atlas Shrugged did Ayn Rand suggest that deception should be used as a tool of a capitalist. As a matter of fact, there were many instances in the novel where the protagonists of the novel were taken advantage of because they did adhere to a higher moral code than the dishonest and manipulating government. In the novel, the government was the one stealing. The conflict was that the owners of industry wouldn't just hand everything over. They wanted to make it perfectly clear that the government was stealing. If it's not already clear, I really liked Atlas Shrugged.
"What a nightmare, a world full of objectivists."
I've met a few who call themselves objectivists because they've read a chapter or two and think they've confirmed their Nietzchean views. If you've met any of these people and thought "this is objectivism," I can understand your opinion. I trust that it is subject to your ongoing appraisal.
Atlas Shrugged presents neither dystopia nor utopia. Both notions are about the last irrevocable note a culture strikes. It shows the worst in men's spirits and the best -- two cultures. The last note of one isn't irrevocable and the note struck by the other isn't it's last.
"Let it just be said that this Romantic tried to call her poor justifications objectivity for a good reason... to hide the lack of any internal coherency."
You're on. Name the lapses in coherency.
"At least half the people that "like" her simply don't understand her and buy the surface level rhetoric of libertarean objectivity."
You're right about that. I've met them. But you're a reasonable chap, right? So you won't call "objectivist" one who claims it for himself falsely, then, will you?
"She hated Libertarians,"
Yes, she did. Her political philosophy was grounded in her ethics and more deeply in her epistemology. It's evident that she believed serious political reform was untenable without a major philosophical evolution. How can a government protect rights they don't believe in? The Libertarians believe there are political solutions to philosophical problems (actually they don't acknowledge the problems are philosophical in nature -- it'd undermine their ringquest). And they don't care to ground their political notions in sound philosophy. As a result they're just shifting dogma like those of the other parties. The LP is well on its way to becoming yet another party (albeit a tiny one) awash in moral pragmatism.
That said, I've voted for their candidate on occasion, when I think it's the best of the available choices. And because the two major parties no longer offset each other as well as they have in the past.
""Objectivity" for her refers to the cold hard outlook, the ability to step over a homeless person, not in the scientific sense of subjecting one's hypothesis to doubt and test."
This is nonsense. A.) When does she step over a homeless person? In what book of hers? In what historical account? As I recall, in Atlas Shrugged, she has Dagny enjoy dinner with a tramp on her train. While it was not for charity, she was aware of the value of the meal to the tramp -- and she treated him respectfully. What would you have preferred? A kiss? Jeez. B.) In science, hypotheses are not "subjected" to "doubt", just to test. Courageous scientists enjoy subjecting hypotheses to the strictest tests because they marvel at those which remain standing. They maintain no affection toward false hypotheses. Because Rand shares none of her own personal introspection with you, you assume there'd been none? Read more. Objectivism isn't about spouting fiat and watching the world morph into spires of glass and steel. It's about determining and stating one's desire, finding out what it takes to accomplish it, and then doing it.
"Nietzsche is a much better way to spend your youthful rebellion against the herd."
Rebellions against herds are for the so-called non-conformists. They're blind to the irony that their ideals are determined by others -- that they've evaded the task of selecting their ideals. What happens when their "enemies" change their ideals? Do they lose the enemy or swap ideals? It's not about what you're against. It's about what you're *for*.
"She [...] was justifying why men that rise to the top of the capitalist world, like Ken Lay, are a better sort of people, period."
There are characters in Atlas Shrugged who "rose to the top" of their world who were most assuredly not capitalists. They were, in fact, villains. Perhaps you should consider reading the book.
"Rand is actually quite dangerous, I think."
Not really. She was short and out of shape. And now she's dead. But perhaps you mean to say that her ideas are quite dangerous. In the sense that they arm rational people against an irrational era, you're right.
"She represents an anti-rationalism which is always a key ingredient in fascism."
The "key ingredient" in fascism is the belief that the State is the creator/grantor of all rights. One would have to be anti-Reason to take this view. Please demonstrate how Ayn Rand supported this view. Take your time.
-B...
Under the category of utopian novels, I nominate Pacific Edge, the third of the Three California's trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson. Each of the three books tells an alternative future of Orange County California. The first is post-apocalyptic, the second is dystopian, and the third is eco-utopian. In Pacific Edge he tells a story of the struggles of a 2065 community fifty years after the US collectively decided to abandon heavy industry, outlaw large corporations, and replace concrete metropolis cities with small sustainable interconnected communities. Without preaching, Robinson draws the reader into the story of his characters' lives in this naturally beautiful could-be world. Another gem from the author of the Red-Green-Blue Mars trilogy.
How many false positives does it have? Is the use of geoip legal for this matter? (Won't they start complaining about it?).
If all there had ever been were her jacked-up laissez-faire free-market bulldogs, solely in pursuit of a profit and freely pursuing their 'rights' to wealth and property, most of us would be dirt poor peasants, licking the feet of dirty fucking despots and warlords. No thank you. Ayn can live in the might-makes-right Utopia of her mind. (Assuming there's an afterlife. Maybe hell is getting what you wished for in life.) Personally, I don't think a little altruism is a very bad thing at all.
I can kind of see why she might react so violently against altruism. She came from the early 1900s Russia which was just finishing up going through a revolution and much corruption was already being seen. Communism was meant to be, basically, the ultimate form of altruism, but it failed (and continues to fail, even to this day). However, flying directly to the other end of the spectrum and saying anything goes is not the answer either. Letting free markets decide what is best for people is as stupid as letting an oligarchic government decide what is best for people. It's just letting one minority (the richest 1%) replace another minority (a fascistic, or possibly communistic government) in making decisions for everyone.
It's inexcusable, short-sighted, anti-dogmatic-turned-dogmatic drivel. Rand's 'philosophy' may have a few good grains of worth in it, but overall it's crawling with mealbugs and needs to be tossed aside for a better harvest. If you want rational people to be armed, they're going to have to read a lot more than a few Ayn Rand books.
Here's a bit of an email exchange with Ton of the Free Blender Fund:
:)
;) but I was thinking that the process you are going through now with the Free Blender project could be formalized as a software application similar to how SourceForge formalized open source development, or maybe even as an added feature of SourceForge.
/. discussion.
--- Ton Roosendaal wrote:
> Hi John,
>
> > Any knowledge of such efforts out there?
>
> You mean of other projects getting open sourced this
> way?
> Nope, I guess it's the first.
>
> -Ton-
Sorry to bug you via email, as I know you may be a little busy with tasks right now
Donators want to know that their donations are going to a good cause and are being used properly and honestly. The Free Blender site convinced me that it was a good cause and that it was run by honest people who meant well. Also, I assumed the financial records are open to peer review, so I felt safe in donating funds.
For specific, well-defined causes such as the Free Blender project, it was easy to see how my donating a few bucks, along with thousands of others doing the same, accomplishes a good thing. There are many other good open source projects out there that could really benefit from a similar funding model.
Any thoughts?
I'm going to post this to the relevant
More thoughts:
The free and open source software communities can take advantage of the scale of the communities to easily fund worthy projects. Though I can't always help directly with development for interesting projects, I can easily spare $5 for a good cause.
Anyone else out there thinking along the same lines?
"Classic UFO's