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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
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.
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!"
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
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.
You've got your cause and effect mixed up there, I'm afraid.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
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
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.
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 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?
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?
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.
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
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
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.
"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...
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.
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?"