Umm yea, when I asked for an essay I was only joking. Listen, the next time I write anything about 1984 I'll make sure that is completely unambiguous, not requiring any thought to ascertain the meaning of my post. I should probably have said 'world as it was at that time' not Britain, although as you'll find from the pompous quotes I provided(or indeed reading the damn book), Britain at the time was a major influence on the book. 'The world as it was in 1948, not a vision of the future' is a quote (paraphrased can't find the direct quote for you now as I am at work) from Orwell himself, not some bullshit pompous essay.
If you don't know how not to take things absolutely literally you probably should be reading fiction at all. On the subject there is a great book of his about some farm animals who think they should walk on two legs, I look forward to your essay on that one.
No it wasn't. Orwell wrote 1984 after beeing delusional on how the communists behaved during the Spanish civil war, where he inititially fought for the communists.
Partly correct,
In his essay Why I Write, Orwell clearly explains that all the "serious work" he had written since the Spanish Civil War in 1936 was "written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism". [1] Therefore, one can look at Nineteen Eighty-Four as a cautionary tale against totalitarianism and in particular the betrayal of a revolution by those claiming to defend or support it. However, as many reviewers and critics have stated, it should not be read as an attack on socialism as a whole, but on totalitarianism and potential totalitarianism.
Also partly incorrect
His work for the overseas service of the BBC, which at the time was under the control of the Ministry of Information, also played a significant role as the basis for his Ministry of Truth (as he later admitted to Malcolm Muggeridge). The Ministry of Information building, Senate House (University of London), was the Ministry of Truth's architectural inspiration.
The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four also reflects various aspects of the social and political life of both the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Orwell is reported to have said that the book described what he viewed as the situation in the United Kingdom in 1948, when the British economy was poor, the British Empire was dissolving at the same time as newspapers were reporting its triumphs, and wartime allies such as the USSR were rapidly becoming peacetime foes ('Eurasia is the enemy. Eurasia has always been the enemy').
In many ways, Oceania is indeed a future metamorphosis of the British Empire (although Orwell is careful to state that, geographically, it also includes the United States, and that the currency is the dollar). It is, as its name suggests, an essentially naval power. Much of its militarism is focused on veneration for sailors and seafarers, serving on board "floating fortresses" which Orwell evidently conceived of as the next stage in the growth of ever-bigger warships, after the Dreadnoughts of WWI and the aircraft carriers of WWII; and much of the fighting conducted by Oceania's troops takes place in defense of India (the "Jewel in the Crown" of the British Empire).
The party newspaper is the times, identified in Orwell's time (and to some degree even at present) as the voice of the British ruling class — rather than, as could have been expected, a publication which started life as the paper of a revolutionary party (like Pravda in the Soviet Union). Note the lack of capital letters in the name. This is a feature of newspeak, the official party language.
O'Brien, who represents the oppressive Party, is in many ways depicted as a member of the old British ruling class (in one case, Winston Smith thinks of him as a person who in the past would have been holding a snuffbox, i.e. an old-fashioned English gentleman).
Yup this is the UK where we have a general belief that some freedom would be quite nice, but in reality our democracy is a bit half arsed due to trying to keep the spoiled bastards called Royalty happy, and no constitution of any kind that would let us call ourselves the 'land of the free'. No-one can really be bothered to get angry about our freedoms being constantly erroded because most of the mainstream media are already aware of the giant boot stamping on our faces and know that if they report about it then it will stamp on their faces a bit more if they do. This article is a case in point.
On the subject of 1984 people often don't realise that the book wasn't George Orwells vision of the future, it was his view of Britain at that time i.e 1948, he just reversed the last two numbers of the year.
Yea well I'm going to make one with cyber-nano-fluids. Unfortunately the use of the word cyber has meant that various Governments are trying to legislate for the cyber-fluid threat.
Why not wait until there is actually a review of this thing before it gets to the front page of Slashdot, the article contains zero useful information, If this nano-fluid is any good it will compare favourably with the H80 etc. If it does then I'll be interested.
The plan was fairly ingenious to a point, obviously it had a fatal flaw 'Vandalising space' as the Russians put it. However at least the Communists were a credible threat, in that they could have wiped out a good portion of the globe with MAD. Why does everyone buy that we need to do the same bullshit because of 'terrorism'. The UK had a much more credible terrorist threat for much of the Cold War in the IRA yet the big UK defense money was still spent on the Cold War threat. Now about that ongoing IRA threat thats still happening because of lack of funds and secret wiretapping of the entire poulation.....oh and back on topic, the theory that the leaders 'bought' actually worked, things really have changed and not for the better.
Oh and by the way, we can supply the terminals as well. What you don't need a million? Ok, we'll why don't we give you a few spares just in case. (quickly loads trucks full of Surface RT's)
Tried to get information about a BIOS update for an Acer desktop from customer support a few years ago. No-one at Acer UK knew anything about it, at one point I was put through to a guy in the parts dept. who supposedly knew more than the front line guys, but he couldn't help either. In desperation I tried to contact Acer US customer support who seemed promising at first but then refused to help because I wasn't an American. Needless to say I won't be buying an off the shelf desktop ever again, and certainly no Acer-branded anything.
My thought is a system where the keys are generated by the email client itself, i.e. on the users computer and the emails encrypted there and then only to be decrypted on arrival at the intended recipient. The only trust needed would be the software publisher and the recipient.
Thanks for the reply, I don't imagine a situation where I would want to encrypt all my email, I imagine a situation though where I might be discussing sensitive business plans(for example) in which case I would be quite happy to talk the other party through it. However, a peer to peer encrypted email service where the exchange of keys was done automatically would be much more usable for everyday users, if it does not exist it might be an interesting project to pursue.
It's like the envelope in snail mail. You put your mail in an envelope to protect it until it arrives at its destination, don't you? Encryption accomplishes the same thing for e-mail.
Not quite true, an envelope achieves what a security expert would call integrity, i. e. You know if someone has read and potentially altered the message, but this is not encryption, for this you need to write your letters in code.
I'm on the verge of installing this Enigmail addon for Thunderbird, however as Thunderbird still uses my web based mail provider it will still show who it's too and from etc, does anyone know of a completely peer to peer e-mail system which could get around this?
Haha yes, of course people who are never exposed to equations are rubbish at reading them. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop. I fear that the only way to get the general public to become more familiar with how to read equations would be to sneak them into sports coverage or something. Other than that my only other thought on the subject, is that surely anyone even a little bit interested in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle would be prepared to at least attempt equations and if not merely skim them and come back to them if needed?
I have the feeling that so many people have a false impression of what genetic modification is, which is based on some poorly thought out Sci Fi plot from years ago.
Here's hoping, but a working business model needs to be up running and able to compete with the old one for this to work. Otherwise the old guard have more or less as much time as they want to come up with another 'tolerable' solution.
Yes indeed, touche and apologies for the comprehension error. It would have been considerate to say the least of the Post office master to check if there was actually any missing money or case to answer. It would have been especially nice for it to have been done before that particular woman( I forget her name) , started to cook the books because every time she phoned to dispute the calculations they slapped another few thousand on her shortfall.
Now, you make a very astute point. Nowhere in the article does it say where this missing money went. That is a very interesting point to me. You'd think it would be trivial for a reporter to find this out. From my perch, that means it can go any which way, because I don't trust government (in any country), I don't trust people and I certainly don't trust the media. This article leaves way too many questions.
I think that after prosecuting the poor victims they will have written off any unrecoverable 'losses' and the saved themselves a good amount in tax, it would be interesting to know how many post offices have just blindly accepted this bug and just stumped up the money with no one actually realising the mistake, in which case it just goes down as pure profit for the post office. In both cases the Post Office end up winners out of this 'creative accounting'.
A really wise post office chief would have done that audit before the first lawsuit.
Yes you are correct, but the trouble is that the word 'Postmaster' conjours an image of someone with authority over a medium to largish business. In reality a lot of postmasters in the UK are simply running a family business/ small shop that just happens to be the Post office as well. A lot of these people have no real business training, do some very simple bookkeeping themselves, and when some software comes along that they've never had to use before, that software had better be bug free and easy enough to use. Before anyone says no software is bug free, I know that, by bug free I mean 'not going to add 13,000 to the turnover of a small business seemingly at random' . In short I think blaming the Postmasters for not being wise enough is just a wee bit disingenuous.
Slashdot Mirror
Umm yea, when I asked for an essay I was only joking. Listen, the next time I write anything about 1984 I'll make sure that is completely unambiguous, not requiring any thought to ascertain the meaning of my post. I should probably have said 'world as it was at that time' not Britain, although as you'll find from the pompous quotes I provided(or indeed reading the damn book), Britain at the time was a major influence on the book. 'The world as it was in 1948, not a vision of the future' is a quote (paraphrased can't find the direct quote for you now as I am at work) from Orwell himself, not some bullshit pompous essay.
Like the AC said, it's working just fine. I'm just replying in kind.
If you don't know how not to take things absolutely literally you probably should be reading fiction at all. On the subject there is a great book of his about some farm animals who think they should walk on two legs, I look forward to your essay on that one.
No it wasn't. Orwell wrote 1984 after beeing delusional on how the communists behaved during the Spanish civil war, where he inititially fought for the communists.
Partly correct,
In his essay Why I Write, Orwell clearly explains that all the "serious work" he had written since the Spanish Civil War in 1936 was "written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism". [1] Therefore, one can look at Nineteen Eighty-Four as a cautionary tale against totalitarianism and in particular the betrayal of a revolution by those claiming to defend or support it. However, as many reviewers and critics have stated, it should not be read as an attack on socialism as a whole, but on totalitarianism and potential totalitarianism.
Also partly incorrect
His work for the overseas service of the BBC, which at the time was under the control of the Ministry of Information, also played a significant role as the basis for his Ministry of Truth (as he later admitted to Malcolm Muggeridge). The Ministry of Information building, Senate House (University of London), was the Ministry of Truth's architectural inspiration. The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four also reflects various aspects of the social and political life of both the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Orwell is reported to have said that the book described what he viewed as the situation in the United Kingdom in 1948, when the British economy was poor, the British Empire was dissolving at the same time as newspapers were reporting its triumphs, and wartime allies such as the USSR were rapidly becoming peacetime foes ('Eurasia is the enemy. Eurasia has always been the enemy'). In many ways, Oceania is indeed a future metamorphosis of the British Empire (although Orwell is careful to state that, geographically, it also includes the United States, and that the currency is the dollar). It is, as its name suggests, an essentially naval power. Much of its militarism is focused on veneration for sailors and seafarers, serving on board "floating fortresses" which Orwell evidently conceived of as the next stage in the growth of ever-bigger warships, after the Dreadnoughts of WWI and the aircraft carriers of WWII; and much of the fighting conducted by Oceania's troops takes place in defense of India (the "Jewel in the Crown" of the British Empire). The party newspaper is the times, identified in Orwell's time (and to some degree even at present) as the voice of the British ruling class — rather than, as could have been expected, a publication which started life as the paper of a revolutionary party (like Pravda in the Soviet Union). Note the lack of capital letters in the name. This is a feature of newspeak, the official party language. O'Brien, who represents the oppressive Party, is in many ways depicted as a member of the old British ruling class (in one case, Winston Smith thinks of him as a person who in the past would have been holding a snuffbox, i.e. an old-fashioned English gentleman).
source for both quotes http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/articles/1984-background-info.htm
Land of the Free(*).
*Conditions may apply.
Yup this is the UK where we have a general belief that some freedom would be quite nice, but in reality our democracy is a bit half arsed due to trying to keep the spoiled bastards called Royalty happy, and no constitution of any kind that would let us call ourselves the 'land of the free'. No-one can really be bothered to get angry about our freedoms being constantly erroded because most of the mainstream media are already aware of the giant boot stamping on our faces and know that if they report about it then it will stamp on their faces a bit more if they do. This article is a case in point.
On the subject of 1984 people often don't realise that the book wasn't George Orwells vision of the future, it was his view of Britain at that time i.e 1948, he just reversed the last two numbers of the year.
Yea well I'm going to make one with cyber-nano-fluids. Unfortunately the use of the word cyber has meant that various Governments are trying to legislate for the cyber-fluid threat.
Why not wait until there is actually a review of this thing before it gets to the front page of Slashdot, the article contains zero useful information, If this nano-fluid is any good it will compare favourably with the H80 etc. If it does then I'll be interested.
Here
It does by default in 8.1 but you can turn it off. I don't have win8 but there was a bit of a fuss when this was revealed by MS.
The plan was fairly ingenious to a point, obviously it had a fatal flaw 'Vandalising space' as the Russians put it. However at least the Communists were a credible threat, in that they could have wiped out a good portion of the globe with MAD. Why does everyone buy that we need to do the same bullshit because of 'terrorism'. The UK had a much more credible terrorist threat for much of the Cold War in the IRA yet the big UK defense money was still spent on the Cold War threat. Now about that ongoing IRA threat thats still happening because of lack of funds and secret wiretapping of the entire poulation.....oh and back on topic, the theory that the leaders 'bought' actually worked, things really have changed and not for the better.
Oh and by the way, we can supply the terminals as well. What you don't need a million? Ok, we'll why don't we give you a few spares just in case. (quickly loads trucks full of Surface RT's)
There is a certain amount of dick waving about this, but the more companies and countries that embarrass America and the NSA the better.
Peer to peer, no third party involved. Just some software on your machine and the recipients. Mail would be as secure as the machine its on.
Tried to get information about a BIOS update for an Acer desktop from customer support a few years ago. No-one at Acer UK knew anything about it, at one point I was put through to a guy in the parts dept. who supposedly knew more than the front line guys, but he couldn't help either. In desperation I tried to contact Acer US customer support who seemed promising at first but then refused to help because I wasn't an American. Needless to say I won't be buying an off the shelf desktop ever again, and certainly no Acer-branded anything.
My thought is a system where the keys are generated by the email client itself, i.e. on the users computer and the emails encrypted there and then only to be decrypted on arrival at the intended recipient. The only trust needed would be the software publisher and the recipient.
Thanks for the reply, I don't imagine a situation where I would want to encrypt all my email, I imagine a situation though where I might be discussing sensitive business plans(for example) in which case I would be quite happy to talk the other party through it. However, a peer to peer encrypted email service where the exchange of keys was done automatically would be much more usable for everyday users, if it does not exist it might be an interesting project to pursue.
So what'd be "encrypted email" for?
It's like the envelope in snail mail. You put your mail in an envelope to protect it until it arrives at its destination, don't you? Encryption accomplishes the same thing for e-mail.
Not quite true, an envelope achieves what a security expert would call integrity, i. e. You know if someone has read and potentially altered the message, but this is not encryption, for this you need to write your letters in code.
I'm on the verge of installing this Enigmail addon for Thunderbird, however as Thunderbird still uses my web based mail provider it will still show who it's too and from etc, does anyone know of a completely peer to peer e-mail system which could get around this?
Haha yes, of course people who are never exposed to equations are rubbish at reading them. It's a self-reinforcing feedback loop. I fear that the only way to get the general public to become more familiar with how to read equations would be to sneak them into sports coverage or something. Other than that my only other thought on the subject, is that surely anyone even a little bit interested in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle would be prepared to at least attempt equations and if not merely skim them and come back to them if needed?
I have the feeling that so many people have a false impression of what genetic modification is, which is based on some poorly thought out Sci Fi plot from years ago.
Here's hoping, but a working business model needs to be up running and able to compete with the old one for this to work. Otherwise the old guard have more or less as much time as they want to come up with another 'tolerable' solution.
Yes indeed, touche and apologies for the comprehension error. It would have been considerate to say the least of the Post office master to check if there was actually any missing money or case to answer. It would have been especially nice for it to have been done before that particular woman( I forget her name) , started to cook the books because every time she phoned to dispute the calculations they slapped another few thousand on her shortfall.
Now, you make a very astute point. Nowhere in the article does it say where this missing money went. That is a very interesting point to me. You'd think it would be trivial for a reporter to find this out. From my perch, that means it can go any which way, because I don't trust government (in any country), I don't trust people and I certainly don't trust the media. This article leaves way too many questions.
I think that after prosecuting the poor victims they will have written off any unrecoverable 'losses' and the saved themselves a good amount in tax, it would be interesting to know how many post offices have just blindly accepted this bug and just stumped up the money with no one actually realising the mistake, in which case it just goes down as pure profit for the post office. In both cases the Post Office end up winners out of this 'creative accounting'.
A really wise post office chief would have done that audit before the first lawsuit.
Yes you are correct, but the trouble is that the word 'Postmaster' conjours an image of someone with authority over a medium to largish business. In reality a lot of postmasters in the UK are simply running a family business/ small shop that just happens to be the Post office as well. A lot of these people have no real business training, do some very simple bookkeeping themselves, and when some software comes along that they've never had to use before, that software had better be bug free and easy enough to use. Before anyone says no software is bug free, I know that, by bug free I mean 'not going to add 13,000 to the turnover of a small business seemingly at random' . In short I think blaming the Postmasters for not being wise enough is just a wee bit disingenuous.
The tower? The tower? Rapunzel!!!
Surely you're not going to quote the entire film?
Fuck off then.