All posts by Paul Raven

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Bay of Pigs to Bay of Penguins – the Cuban Linux fork

LOLcastroRemember we mentioned late last year that Cuba was talking about going open-source to guarantee their technological independence from the United States (and presumably everyone else as well)?

Well, it seems that Cuba has not only adopted Linux but started developing its own independent distribution:

Nova is Cuba’s own configuration of Linux and bundles various applications of the operating system.

Rodriguez said several government ministries and the Cuban university system have made the switch to Linux but there has been resistance from government companies concerned about its compatibility with their specialized applications.

“I would like to think that in five years our country will have more than 50 percent migrated (to Linux),” he said.

Unlike Microsoft, Linux is free and has open access that allows users to modify its code to fit their needs.

“Private software can have black holes and malicious codes that one doesn’t know about,” Rodriguez said. “That doesn’t happen with free software.”

As TechDirt points out, that last comment isn’t really true at all; whether it was included out of ignorance or for propaganda purposes will presumably remain a mystery.

I wonder if they’ll open up the repositories to non-Cuban users? It’s another great propaganda angle – stuffing the man pages with little homilies on object-orientated Communism from Castro and Guevara… [via SlashDot image by factor_]

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Friday Free Fiction for 13th February

Unlucky for some, perhaps… but we’re no fans of superstition here at Futurismic. And how could it be unlucky to receive a big batch of free science fiction stories to read online, exactly?

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Here’s a fistful of shorts from Manybooks:

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Strange Horizons presents “Obedience” by Brenna Yovanoff

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Pyr are hosting an excerpt from End of the Century by Chris Roberson

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Polu Texni presents “Very Truly Yours” part 3 by Seth Gordon

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Last week I forgot to mention that the new edition of Lone Star Stories also has poetry:

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Here’s some recent fictional output from Subterranean Online:

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Hub Magazine presents “The Astronomer of Baghdad” by Matt Keefe

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Tor.com presents “Escape to Other Worlds with Science Fiction” by Jo Walton

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Here’s another freebie from Chris Roberson – “The Funeral Affair”

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The SF Signal gang are playing host to excerpts from David Moody’s Hater. Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 appeared in previous weeks, and Chapter 3 is available now.

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SF Signal‘s magical internet colander also caught these little morsels that we’d otherwise have missed:

  • The new issue of Abyss & Apex features fiction by Pauline J Alama, Marie Brennan, Fraser Sherman, Richard Foss, Karl Bunker, and Samantha Henderson
  • MindFlights presents “A Native Soul” by Anne M Pillsworth
  • The latest issue of Byzarium features fiction by Andrew Kaye, Andy Bolt and Elizabeth Hopkinson
  • Big Pulp presents “To Know” by Amanda Walczesky, “Regrets Of A Conquistador” by Jonathan S Pembrook and “The Other Job” by Stephanie Scarborough

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There’s no flash from Gareth L Powell this week, but he has an except from his story “Arches”, which is on the long-list of this year’s Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award.

Checking in for your regular Friday flash dosage this week are the following:

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And there’s your lot for another week; don’t forget we’re always looking for tip-offs and recommendations, so if you think we’re missing things let us know! In the meantime, have a great weekend.

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The internet isn’t making you stupid. People are making you stupid.

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Westboro Baptist Church "protestor"One of the perennial themes that news sources both online and offline never seem to tire of is “the internet is making us stupid”. According to science historian Robert Proctor, that’s only half correct; it’s not the internet itself that encourages ignorance, but the way it is used by groups with a single point of interest:

[Proctor] has developed a word inspired by this trend: agnotology. Derived from the Greek root agnosis, it is “the study of culturally constructed ignorance.”

As Proctor argues, when society doesn’t know something, it’s often because special interests work hard to create confusion. Anti-Obama groups likely spent millions insisting he’s a Muslim; church groups have shelled out even more pushing creationism. The oil and auto industries carefully seed doubt about the causes of global warming. And when the dust settles, society knows less than it did before.

“People always assume that if someone doesn’t know something, it’s because they haven’t paid attention or haven’t yet figured it out,” Proctor says. “But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing truth—or drowning it out—or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what’s true and what’s not.”

What is an observable certainty is that the web has become an ideological battle-ground, with dozens of little sects crusading around in defence of their own worldview, ever ready to smother dissent in a barrage of obfuscation.

What is less certain is how new this phenomenon actually is; it strikes me that the web just lets us do the same things we’ve always done, just faster and more anonymously. Somewhere in the distance, I hear the nitrous-oxide cackling of postmodern theorists… perhaps “things fall apart; the center cannot hold“. [via TechDirt; image by Logan Cyrus]

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Why Wikipedia is (apparently) doomed to fail

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As a poster-child of the Web2.0 success story, Wikipedia has grown from a small but thriving community of volunteers into one of the most well-used online resources there is. But that community-driven character could be Wikipedia’s doom, according to professor of law Eric Goldman – and he thinks the rot has long since set in.

Now, the editors themselves discourage the contributions of others through “xenophobia” toward outsiders; Goldman believes that they see “threats” everywhere and points out that the greater part of all edits made to the site are actually reverted by these editors.

In addition, plenty of political jockeying takes place among editors. And editors have few incentives for their work—no way to make money, no real way even to earn attribution. Together, these problems mean that as editors get burned out by patrolling for spam and vandalism, fewer new people will be interested in stepping up to plug the gap.

Of course, there’s probably plenty of people who would like to slap a whole bunch of [citation needed] links all over Goldman’s theory. But what he’s describing seems to be the same sort of institutional breakdown that can be observed in communities, political movements and any other human group effort.

Perhaps it’s the case that Wikipedia has grown too quickly for its culture to evolve affective coping strategies; maybe smaller subject-specific communities would be more resilient? But then again, maybe they’d just become more cultish more quickly, as has the Church of Darwin.

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Darwin as a religious icon

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Charles Darwin portraitIt is, of course, the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, which is a cause for celebration if you’re of a scientific mind. But how much celebration is really appropriate? [image courtesy Wikimedia Commons]

Responding at the Guardian to artist Damien Hirst’s gushing foreword to a new edition of The Origin of Species (as well as to Darwin’s unfortunate position in the middle of the tug-o’war between fundamentalist religion and militant atheism) Andrew Brown wonders whether the pedestal on which we’ve put Darwin is too high – and whether some of his more fervent supporters, in using him as an icon against religion, have in fact made a religion of him:

… treating Darwin, or any other scientist, as a wonder-worker just turns science into a priesthood. That doesn’t do anyone any good, neither scientists nor the rest of us. Darwin was a good man and his theory was a great one. But believing it, even understanding it, won’t make the goodness and the greatness rub off on the believers.

To be honest, the whole battle between the crusading atheists and their target pockets of the irrational is starting to worry me in just the same way as the fundamentalist sects. I’m an atheist myself, but I work on the principle that if I object to having someone else’s ideology crammed down my throat, they probably won’t like me doing it to them either.

And, as a matter of pragmatism, persecuting the irrationally religious does little beyond creating martyrdom, and the last thing we need is more people fixated on that.