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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 vote for "Infinite Jest" by David Foster Wallace -- but that's because I think giant hurds of free-roaming hamsters would rule. --MM
Sorry, but I find Utopian Novels much more depressing than end of the world, apocolypse novels. Any book about Utopia is a work of fiction, something that will never be achieved as long as humans are involved. Where as apocoplypse is where we are going, regardless of your opinion. I'd rather not read more and more lies about how "great" humanity could do it if worked together. This isn't a troll and this isn't flamebait. I'm just stating how I feel.
A story about ISPs blocking pop-ups that has a pop-ups? Is Salon.com charging Earthlink for the additional enticement?
Really, is Atlas Shrugged suggested as a utopia or dystopia? What a nightmare, a world full of objectivists.
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
To merge the topic of Blender with that of another recent subject, has anyone started a fund for creating Free fonts to eliminate Free software's dependence upon Microsoft's fonts? From the discussion that has already occured, it seems as though the only sane and reasonable way to get high-quality, consistant fonts is to scrap some money together and pay a professional to do so.
:Peter
People, if a _rendering_ program, that is probably used by a relatively small amount of people, can reach 90% of its goal in four weeks, what can we do about raising funds for fonts, which everyone has an interest in? What we need now is for someone or some organization well-respected within the community to speak up and say, "The pot is open! Come chip in!"
The only annoying thing about the free version is that it stops a netscape messanger mail window from being opened. Even when the user clicks on the mail icon to request the window it gets blocked. I understand the non-free version allows for finer control of what gets blocked, but I have not downloaded it yet.
He's a damn Objectivist.
Ceci n'est pas un post
Becuase frankly, utopias are fucking boring. Novels that tell a story of triumph against all odds, winning out against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune... those are the stories that speak to the real human condition of fighting adversity. As evidence, consider Dante's writing series. Paradiso is pages and pages of crap about how wonderful heaven is. Boooooring. Inferno is much more interesting reading. (I guess you could say that Inferno is a contra-example to my thesis since the focus of the story is really more on the suffering of the damned than the travel of the main character, but otoh the narrator does travel through the bowels of hell, no doubt a frightening journey, only to return unharmed.)
So in the field of uplifting stories, stories that, like Shawshank Redemption, are of people crawling through a river of shit to come out clean on the other side, I'll toss in Bryce Courtenay's The Power of One . I read it when I was 14, and honestly I think it's had more of a lasting impact on me than any other written work, Bible included. When the times get tough (and I've had my share of tough times in the decade since then), I think it's that books message of self-reliance and determination that carried me through. (Or at least, like a boxer, I would have gone down swinging if I had...)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Pop Ups pay for the content you read on certain sites. Yep, the internet isn't free nor is the content. It costs to generate content and one way of paying for that is, shudder, advertising.
Someone has to pay. If it's not pop ups it'll be something else.
Why do people continue to believe that the internet is free and always will be free?
We don't have a micropayment system in place, so web site operators need to generate revenue somewhere.
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!
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.
Seriously, why all the big hoo-haa about the removal of popups when it's easy to install some unobtrusive trustworthy software which destroys them without you even noticing?
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
Even though I knew I wouldn't get the t-shirt... oh well. I'll also probably never really use Blender, though I have been considering just downloading it to fiddle with it. Regardless, I pitched in $5, because I felt it was a good cause. I like the idea of free software... especially the "free" part... but the people who put all the work into projects like this have to eat, and I'm ok with contributing to something that will provide a substantial benefit to the community and world as a whole. Good luck Blender Team, and to all of you fledgling artists, put my $5 to good use.
Just like the argument for bayesian analysis of SPAM, reason-based analyis of trolls is fundamentally flawed, as can be seen by the broken "lameness" filters. A neural network/bayesian approach would probably work much better at finding the features trolls have in common. Slashdot could mark likely trolls automatically after they are analyzed by the system, and users could filter "likely troll" in their user preferences page. But mostly, this would be a cool project to do, and I wish CmdrTaco would be more willing to allow direct database access for academic projects. Screen-scraping is not an attractive prospect.
Ceci n'est pas un post
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?
Plato's Republic is, perhaps, the original Utopian work. It's not a novel, but it does lay out what Plato believes it would take to form an ideal society.
It's no where near as long as a modern novel and well worth reading just to see the genesis of Utopian thought
.
If you're not living on the edge, you're taking up too much space.
Leto
If anyone's interested, I'll be combining them in a bound volume for only $19.95 a copy, per year, per seat.
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
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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.
I don't see how blowing up the Golden Gate Bridge constitutes "ending well". The book was a long and trite "if everyone did things my way, look how great it would be". The protagonists were terrorists by every meaning of the word. They attacked civilian targets, killed innocent people, and we rewarded for it. The bad guys won.
By the end of the book, I was deeply saddened that their plans weren't foiled, that the thinly-veiled United-Nations-cum-Fascist-Overlords didn't blow the colony to smithereens, that they got away with such atrocities, and that Heinlein had the nerve to try and justify it all!
I really hated that book. It sickened me and left me with a very foul impression of its author. Perhaps it was a bad Heinlein book to start off with, because now I refuse to read any of his others, no matter how well recommended they are.
... from the blender3d website...
NaN Holding recognizes that, giving all circumstances and the current economic situation, moving on with Blender to this next stage will be the most beneficial thing to do, to protect past investments, but also to respect everything that has been realized until now by the NaN companies and the world-wide user community.
NaN Holding being the current owner of blender, and supposedly seeing open source as the way to go... then what am I missing here? Why does the blender fund exist for the purpose of purchasing a development license from NaN?? Bueller?
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
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.
The Songs of the Distant Earth by Arthur C. Clarke.
The story chronicles the happenings of two human civilisations: One, founded in the remote planet of Thalassa, colonized by humans in a distant past. The Thalassans live in peace and harmony, thought their lives are a bit dull. The other civilisation is a group of people from Earth who are just "passing by". The conflict arises when these two civilisations meet one another and...
Here is the link at Amazon -- check out the reviews.
Cheers!
Ehttp://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
I think you have a good idea that does not go far enough. Let's not just free the fonts, let's free all of Microsoft and buy them out! I wonder what would happen if we (opensource community) all gained a majority control in Microsoft. Couldn't we just force them to become open/free/libre?
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?
If you haven't read it, run, don't walk to Amazon and buy it now. Now that's my kind of "utopia". Government is a dirty word and everyone carries guns. They invented the internet in the 1800's.
Seriously, Smith has written over 20 books with libertarian themes carried to their logical conclusions. They aren't preachy, but darn good plots and good characters you can actually like.
Second place goes to anything by Heinlein.
Read about it here.
Before anyone here says that fonts are easy to make, you're probably forgetting the non-western character sets and the thousands of unicode characters.
Just as there are fonts that specialize in "CJK" (Chinese Japanese Korean) glyphs, there can also be "LGC" fonts for Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic. A good font editor will have the user draw a bunch of glyphs representing A-Z in Latin, the Greek, Cyrillic, and IPA glyphs that do not match the Latin glyphs, and then some diacritics. Then from that data, it'll "compose" glyphs for the first 1500 or so characters in Unicode.
Another optimization: when creating a new glyph, copy parts from similar glyphs and present them to the font designer for further work. For example, from b and p, you get (thorn). From D, you get Ð (edh). From l and n, you get h. From n, you can infer most of m. From f, you get long s, and from long s and normal s, you get ß.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Good grief, how could anyone recommend inflicting that tome on another human being? It's nothing but boring plot used to tie together Objectivist monologues on the evils of supporting the non-productive members of a society! Not that I disagree, in principle, but there's a 40'page monologue in that thing! 40 damn pages of objectivism! That's too much to be healthy.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Since many of the more slimey ones like to use open relays, perhaps that could be used to our advantage. A simple script which smelled like an open relay to anyone connecting to it, but in reality only placed messages in a queue for manual confirmation or something, could be used. Make it log everything anyone does to it, including full message contents, source address, traceroute info, whatever would prove useful in the court case. Its a simple variation on the honeypot theme, really.
In fact, I think such a script may actually be worth writing. Hmmm. Does anyone have snort logs or something of the mechanism their probes use, or am I gonna have to write a full SMTP implementation?
Paranoid
Bwaahahahahaa.
"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.
Pop Up stopper does the job of killing pop up ads while allowing me to surf sites that actually "need" to pop up a new window.
No Zen is good zen
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
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Laugh if you want, but as a member of this society you would likely be very happy and want for little.
Don't forget that whale that crushed our Jimmy
I'm not sure I'd call any of Douglas Adams' books utopian....funny yes, but the way the were funny, was by illustrating all that is wrong with Life, the Universe and Everything
I would hardly call a universe in which a planet is destroyed to make way for an interstellar bypass, with the occupants being told that they had a chance to view the plans in another galaxy somewhere, as Utopia.
Advanced users are users too!
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.
> (Finally a good use for the key, since like Lotus 1-2-3 for DOS, circa 1980s!)
Never had to use a terminal much have you?
It's one of the more useful keys on the keyboard.
Advanced users are users too!
Actually, Washington has a rather lame law. I was going to go after a spammer in Iowa that was spoofing my domain name, but then I found out that Washington State limits you to $500 dollars as an individual / $1,000 as an ISP. It just wasn't worth the time. As it turns out, somebody from Virginia was going to sue under their laws for about $25,000, so it's all good.
Ironic that the Soviet socialist regime would produce canonical utopian writing while simultaneously providing creative material for truly disturbing stories like Nabokov's Bend Sinister.
Is it too late to weigh in with Bend Siniter as my vote for a distopian novel? It is the sort of book you read exactly once.
. Penguins Surely Ca
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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
The only thing I can find that is a (happy) Utopian novel is B.F. Skinner's Walden II, which is honestly a very interesting read. The book interested largely in the mechanics and psychology required for such a society, with just enough plot to keep Skinner's ideas moving.
I have been told that it was the basis for Brave New World in some form or another, but it might just be Skinner's ideas that Huxley was borrowing from/parodying.
I suppose you could count the original Walden (which has no relation to Walden II beyond the idea of utopia), but living alone doesn't qualify as Utopia...after all, the reasons that Utopias fall apart are...other people.
Sartre was right, after all.
Also, the concept of "Utopia" is usually written about for the sense of irony...reference 1984...plus we can find lots of stories like Animal Farm: good intentions turned to mud by human flaws. The point of Utopia, from a writers view, is to trample on it, generally. Take that for what it's worth.
--ryan.
Don't say, "don't quote me," because if no one quotes you, you probably haven't said a thing worth saying.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Its a bit too dreamy, but definitely highlights some brilliant ideas. Ecotopia is a VERY nice vision of the future.
GPL'd web-based tradewars themed space game
"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...
Only governments tax. What a maroon.
Heh. I love the little synchronicities in life. Just these past few days, that's become something of a catch-phrase among myself and my co-workers. "What a maroon. What an ultra-maroon. What a nin-cow-poop."
The world's a big place, big enough for anything. Right now, somewhere, a baby is being born, an old person is dying, and somebody is saying, "What a maroon. What an ultra-maroon. What a nin-cow-poop."
In my experience, the only dangerous people (to me) are irrational.
It depends on how "dangerous" is used in context. It's quite likely that the irrational person should be a danger to the rational person, if you interpret "dangerous" to mean "a threat to the rationality of the rational person." How many otherwise rational people have been swayed into irrational opinions or beliefs through the persuasion of an irrational but charismatic individual?
In all people, there appears to be a sort of animal hind-brain that wants to be told what to do. Sentience is a burden, and it's one that we are all to quick to shrug off if given half a chance.
Relativists can escape any constraints.
The joke made over lunch today:
Dave: There are no absolutes in our culture. There's an exception to every rule.
Me: Gee, Dave, I don't think you can make a blanket statement like that.
So far, WebWasher has removed 270,110 banner ads for me. Including the ones on Slashdot. WebWasher can double the speed of page loads on dialup connections, just by eliminating the ad traffic. Yes, a few sites detect WebWasher, but you probably don't want to look at them anyway.
WebWasher needs some work; the individual version isn't being updated. But it's still ahead of the competitive products.
After using WebWasher for a year, I've almost forgotten that the Web used to have advertising.
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.
Relativists can escape any constraints. But they can't bring their principles with them.
:-)
Ooo... good one. Mind if I quote you on that?
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
How many otherwise rational people have been swayed into irrational opinions or beliefs through the persuasion of an irrational but charismatic individual?
;-)
Then they weren't very rational to begin with hm?
It is quite possible to foster a habit of constant questioning and skepticism (especially of "authority figures"). Indeed, it is necessary for any hope of true rationality.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Then they weren't very rational to begin with hm?
Bah. Your tautologies hold no interest for me.
- Islandia (Austin Tappan Wright)
- The Dispossessed (Ursula K. Le Guin)
- Woman on the Edge of Time (Marge Piercy)
Be warned, however, that some of these are reasonably depressing, despite being about utopias...Danny.
I have written over 900 book reviews
I think there's a club for people who can't finish reading Infinite Jest. It includes me and another guy I know. We discuss the first 100 pages every now and again. I haven't had so much trouble reading a book since that 5th book in the Foundation trilogy, and that was 15 years ago.
-a
How to rationalize theft.
It's the only way to resolve the contradiction.
p: person is rational
q: person is swayed by irrational arguments
p->~q <=> T
~p OR ~q
Can only be true when p is false.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
You're attempting to prove that only irrational people get swayed by irrational arguments by taking as a given that rational people are not swayed my irrational arguments. Borrr-ing.
Nothing personal, but your comment was a waste of tablespace.
The law in washington is not designed to protect domain spoofing, sorry.
Actually, the law protects against forged headers. Check it out here. I find it really annoying because some junkmail service is sending out spam making it look like it's coming from my site. I want it to stop, but the $500 dollars isn't worth the time I would have to spend doing it.
Chasing! If you look at the eyelids, during REM sleep they're moving like mad. Sometimes you see the legs twitching, I think this is a reaction to seeing something like a "prey" in the dream.
I think that's reasonable, but I have to wonder if he's dreaming about chasing or about being chased. It bothers me to think of my dog having nightmares. Which is kind of strange, because I'm not really a dog person, especially-- the dog is my girlfriend's, and I inherited him when we moved in together. But thinking of my dog lying there alone, in the dark, afraid of something... that bothers me more than I'd care to admit. So when he's dreaming, I always put my hand on him to either comfort him or wake him up a little, and he calms down. Of course, if he was dreaming about chasing pork spare ribs through an endless meadow, then I just royally fouled that up for him, didn't I?
I don't suppose it makes much sense to spend time thinking about dog dreams. But I do, I do.
You're attempting to prove that only irrational people get swayed by irrational arguments by taking as a given that rational people are not swayed my irrational arguments.
rational
adj 1: consistent with or based on or using reason;
How needlessly complicated would you make it?
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Similarly, a Distopia describes a place which is run on lines which you would dislike.
Beyond a cherished few classics (1984, A Brave New World, The Matrix) your choice of [U|Dis]topia says more about you than it does about how human nature is likely to allow circumstances to evolve and develop.
Personal view: Atlas Shrugged... [shudder]. I prefer Robert Anton Wilson's parody 'Telemachus Sneezed' in the Illuminatus! trilogy.
Hmm, Illuminatus!... Now there was a [U|Dis]topia! I'm not sure which yet, though. Let me read it a few dozen more times, and I'll get back to you.
"This is a Hollywood movie: when it comes to the Laws of Physics, they're lucky if they get Gravity!" --- my wife
Great, free TrueType Japanese fonts are available via:
/usr/ports/japanese/kochi-ttfonts && make install clean
/usr/ports/print be converted to TrueType? Or the Adobe fonts?
# cd
or
# portinstall -R ja-kochi-ttfonts
Can's some of the TeX fonts in
So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish was about as utopian as Adams' 'trilogy' got. Arthur Dent returning to Earth, hooking up with a girl, committing some very peculiar (but amusing) lewd acts, and finally taking off again into space to continue his adventures! And add to that Ford Prefect's obsession with Earth-nostalgia in classic films, and that leaves us with the most feel-good book of the Hitchhiker's 'Trilogy'. :) I'd think of it as an Utopian novel, all in all.
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
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?"
by CS Lewis was one of the best utopian sci-fi trilogies to be forgotten by almost everyone. It consists of "Out of the Silent Planet", "Perelandra", and "That Hideous Strength". Pure allegory at parts, but funny and inspiring through and through (other than a bit at the end of Perelandra where Lewis lapsed into his philosophical style).
In my technique, the program would copy parts from 'f' and 'Turkish dotless i' glyphs and have the font designer stitch them together by editing the splines.
And you'll most likely end up with a font that is almost, if not entirely, awful.
Letter forms are not generated algorithmically. A "b" is not an upside-down "p." These things have to be drawn by hand by people with talent-- more talent than I have, to be sure-- and refined at a level of detail that you wouldn't believe. But, believe it or not, when you've got a page full of it, tiny, almost microscopic, differences in letter forms make a huge difference.
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
Speaking of utopias, I highly recommend Culture from the books of Ian M. Banks (e.g. Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, The Use of Weapons, etc.)
Kaa
Kaa's Law: In any sufficiently large group of people most are idiots.
There is weighting to take care of disporportionate amounts of good/bad e-mail.
One other interesting thing that prompted me to reply is that HTML e-mails are actually more deadly for the spammers. Since the proscribed filtering process is token based, not content based, the markup used to display the jpeg counts against them since there is more HTML spam than legitimate mail.
All I wanted was a rock to wind a piece of string around, and I ended up with the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota
The Taj Mahal is a historic landmark and the Golden Gate Bridge isn't?
Depends on your definition, I suppose. By comparison with the Taj Mahal, the first coat of paint on the Golden Gate isn't yet dry...
"Information wants to be paid"
I'm not a relativist; I consider myself sympathetic to utilitarian principles, although there are certainly some principles I would not bend. Your delusion that someone must be either an absolutist or a total moral relativist is revealing. I think both moral relatavists and absolutists will run into problems when they attempt to deal with the real world.
Ceci n'est pas un post
And that's why I explicitly stated that each generated glyph would be presented to the font designer for tweaking
And I'm saying that tweaking won't get you where you want to be, at least not without more effort than just drawing the glyphs from scratch would entail.
That's like saying you want to take a painting of a woman and "tweak" it into a different painting of a woman. They're both portraits of women, right? Why start from scratch every time you paint a portrait of a woman, when you can just take the last one you painted and "tweak" it?
It's been a few years since I read it, but I seem to recall counting 40 pages? Are we talking about the same monologue? I'm thinking about the radio broadcast.
I'm the stranger...posting to
Gosh, where would she be if she'd had to stay in her homeland of Russia in the 1920s?
Probably an underground writer of the same sort of materials, perhaps dead at a much earlier age for having beliefs that contrasted with a State mandated hive-mind of anonymity. Her beliefs came directly from her experience with extreme 'altruism' of communal life. And she came away knowing that altruism cannot be mandated, if it exists at all.
Personally, I don't think a little altruism is a very bad thing at all.
Altruism, or the denial of it, is a small part of objectivist dogma. I personally believe that people are generally not altruistic. An act of kindness can come from any person, but the feeling that you've done well by someone is the 'selfish' reward. True altruism, in my opinion, requires a person to do right by others when there is no appreciation, or possibly backlash, and still feel good about their actions. People just don't work that way.
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.
Um, a free market isn't driven by a few megalomaniacal businesspeople. The free market is driven by consumer purchases and interests. The people choose what they want, and they get it. Fascism has nothing to do with it.
Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
That's the problem. You appear to just be spouting out your own technique. You're not actually a font designer, are you?
I'll confess. I've only designed bitmap fonts for video games. I've written tools to help me do that, and the techniques I have described match what my tools do.
Fact: In the United States, you cannot copyright a bitmap font. However, you can copyright a program (in the Metafont, PostScript, or TrueType hinting language) that generates a font. To circumvent this, start by running an autotracer on a large L/G/C Unicode chart written in that font, but note that you do lose kernpairs in the process.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Actually, the FAQ page states that it is a non-profit organization. My bad. You can justify a non-profit venture because of the type of world we currently live in which gives people incentives to donate.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
Your delusion that someone must be either an absolutist or a total moral relativist is revealing.
Can you explain how it could be any other way? Either morals are fixed and are thus absolute, or they can change and are thus relative. Saying they are both is violating the Principle of Non-Contradiction.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.
My position is that politics falls squarely into the realm of opinion. That is to say, we can evaluate various policies, but that does not imply that there is an objective "best" policy for every situation.
Most interesting scientific truths are also relative in this way; there are several correct ways of viewing them. Weight, speed, length, are all relative. This is a consequence of Relativity (which you clearly do not understand.)
Ceci n'est pas un post
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.
To clarify, they have a right to pursue wealth and property, but the right to wealth and property does not materialize until it has been acquired through legitimate means - that being hard work, innovation, and self-discipline.
I suppose the growing system here in the U.S., where others are free to pursue their right to your property is better. It's called entitlement. It's exactly this kind of twisted thinking (among other things) that objectivism seeks to address.
I've already adressed this in another comment, but also consider that admitting to an objective reality does not mean that all things must be viewed objectively. We can decide that some matters have room for subjectivity.
You seem to embrace subjectivity for convenience's sake, and I take issue with this. It's akin to the "worse is better" programming philosophy; it gets things done quickly, but in the long run it breaks down and has to be done over again. Instead why not put more upfront effort and design it right the first time? Do you think the founding fathers just pulled crap out of their hats when they wrote the constitution? I'm sure they went through painstaking effort to try and balance the system such that freedom would be maintained. And it's still going today.
Most interesting scientific truths are also relative in this way; there are several correct ways of viewing them. Weight, speed, length, are all relative. This is a consequence of Relativity
They are relative to a frame of reference but are absolute within that frame. Similarly, a conclusion is relative to the set of premises you begin with, but within any given set of premises, there is an absolute, best solution.
Higher Logics: where programming meets science.