The Free Plotware Foundation

so what if aliens were'nt intelligent at all - in fact they were just
highly effective physical creatures (viz Alien, the movie etc)?
and wht if they invade a planet of disembodied intelligences
and trap the disembodied intelligences in the alien body to form a
more effective creature?
and what if that planet was earth?
origin of the garden of eden legend, or perhaps of the
story of lucifer falling from heaven, or both?
Planet of Trapped Souls, coming soon to a Holodeck near you!!!
...This has been a Free Plotware Foundation missive...


----------


What about adding some "sliding doors" flavour to this scenario:
If the next good thing to happen to you is revealed to you beforehand it
does not eventually happen (and this is only due to the revelation itself).
E.g. if it is revealed to you that you are going to win the Nobel prize you
don't eventually get it although you were initially destined to do so (the
observation alters the result of the experiment).
Now imagine being persecuted by people who intentionally tell you all good
things that can happen to you only to eliminate the possibility of anything
good actually happening.
Would be good as a plot for an Italian film with the "Fantozzi" character...


-----

Subject: from the free plotware foundation

remember in hitchiker's guide, there's this truck driver who gets
rained on everywhere he goes, and he's eternally grumpy - but never
catcches on that he is, in fact, the rain god
what about a curse you could put on someone so that no matter what
they do, the next ecciting thing to happen to them is revealed
e.g. sitting n top of bus o nthe way to the cinema, they hear the
ending of the film
someone sends them an email congratulating them on winning the nobel
prize (only they havnt heard yet)
they turn off the tv to avoid hearing the baseball results and go and
read their email and someone has a gloating .sig they've just updated
with the score...
etc etc
a new kind of hell?


remember in hitchiker's guide, there's this truck driver who gets
rained on everywhere he goes, and he's eternally grumpy - but never
catcches on that he is, in fact, the rain god
what about a curse you could put on someone so that no matter what
they do, the next ecciting thing to happen to them is revealed
e.g. sitting n top of bus o nthe way to the cinema, they hear the
ending of the film
someone sends them an email congratulating them on winning the nobel
prize (only they havnt heard yet)
they turn off the tv to avoid hearing the baseball results and go and
read their email and someone has a gloating .sig they've just updated
with the score...
etc etc
a new kind of hell?
jon



beneath the planet of the bicyclists

so early in the 21st century, this guy invents a warp speed bicycle
and on his first test run, it goes otu of control when he is struck
by an odd sub-light speed vehicle that looks a lot like the train at
the end of back-to-the future
anyhow, he wakes up in a street at dusk, and sees a bunch of nasty
looking critters in some rusty old vehicles - gist of the plot is that
these are all mutants who live on a new atmospherre of methane and gas
fumes...and have extra large lungs and weedy legs just fit for pushing
down o nthe gas pedal - he esapcves down a dusty subway where he is
led to safety by some other odd critters with ultra-powerful lergs and
very thick craniums.....
near the end of his journeys, he discovers and old reel-to-real movie
and manages to play it by strapping it over the cogs on an old
bike...and finds that , yes, he is on planet earth - in fact he is in
paris, where the year is now 17890 AD; the human race has split into 4
parts
moto-reests
and
bi-psych-leests
are the main two species - the former are evolved to cope with the
intense heat and poor lite in nightime, whilst the latter are now able
to withstand 30Mbps impact from the former's vehicles....
two further subspecies exist where there is a marked gender
dominance in the mixture - in london, it is said that the moto are
dominant male.....
rumour has it that in far off california, hot-air-balloneests
have evolved whilst a strange cult of creatures from the area aroudn
the tigris-euphrates valley have started getting around by
WALKING ON THEIR HIND LEGS
again....
to be continued


----------
from the free plotware foundation, another chiller
Were-house
By day, its a storage facility
By night, once in a blue moon, its a frat house,
scene for Scream 3...
coming to a small scream near you real soon now...

-----------------


I thought a nice structure for a really nerdy (read "cult") book would
be about someone debugging shareware code found on the net, finding a
message hidden in a comment, which refers to some consipracy, e.g. by
some large software house to impoverish all the world by locking all
the users into using some large development program all centered
around a single OS ( e.g. generic theme of shrinking gene pool)
but secretly about to release a completely different OS with a new set
of apps (end of dinosaurs)....meanwhile the book would be structured
like a structured walk through and re-design (and would itself suffer
fro msecond system syndrome).....it would abound with references to
secret organisations (the dia, mossad, npd), and would have lots of
spurious website links (a few of which might work occasionally as part
of the promotion of the book)
like snowcrash, it would be essentiual to have a happy ending (perhaps
the earth enters a solar flare which renders all computers useless for
example...)

from the Free Plotware Foundation, another short series of
science friction minitales...
1/ in Georgia State University, scientists working in the Human Genome
project discover the gene that causes the terrible disfiguring disease
common amogst humans that makes their skin coloured - the state
government immediately siezes the work on the basis that removing
this from the race would elimiate the supply of low cost farm
labour...
2/ in Boston University, scientists working in the Human Genome
Project discover the gene that causes the terrible disfiguring
disease common amogst humans that makes their skin white. two of the
noble researchers test a treatment based on it on themselves but
are arrested for vagrancy while on vacation in south carolina.
3/ in the University of California at Berkeley, scientists working in
the Human Genome Project discover the gene that causes the terrible disease
common amogst humans that makes them racist, but refuse to release it
on the grounds that there are some people who might add this gene to
the race rather than eliminate it.
4/ in the university of life, nature finds a way to elimiate the gene
from the human race that causes people to work on genetics....

---------------->

perhaps the problem is that everyone who does a prototypical
implementation does it on linux or netbsd or freebsd, which gives us 2
or three (usually source code avaialble ) reference implementations,
but what most people in business and the home and entertainment need
is an IOS, solaris, windows or playsos implementation (TM-
"implementation" is a trademark of the Free Plotware Foundation, a not
for profit global conspiracy of internet illuminati:-)
the problem is that the competent foks that contribute these free
reference implementations often vehemently refuse to work on some of
the aforesaid military strength and intelligence operating system
platforms....

Is this really a problem? Typically it's not that hard to move
something from Linux or FreeBSD to a commercial OS like Solaris. For
certain kernel-level issues it might be an issue, but for protocols
implemented user-level, it's a complete non-issue.
My experience is also that if there is a widely used free
implementation, even if commercial vendors have to (horrors!) pay
programmers to write a version which works with their own propietary
kernel, it's much easier to satisfy interoperability concerns if there's
a free version of the protocol to test against.


>>> I posit that this very same requirement for multiple, independent
>>> implementations is our very best defense against the kinds of attacks
>>> on "commodity protocols" contemplated by the Evil Empire in that memo.
>>> I, for one, will defend this requirement to the death.
>>Perhaps we coupld strengthen this defense by bringing the "multiple
>>implementations" requirement earlier in the process.
originally, we didn't specify operating systems in this requirement
perhaps the problem is that everyone who does a prototypical
implementation does it on linux or netbsd or freebsd, which gives us 2
or three (usually source code avaialble ) reference implementations,
but what most people in business and the home and entertainment need
is an IOS, solaris, windows or playsos implementation (TM-
"implementation" is a trademark of the Free Plotware Foundation, a not
for profit global conspiracy of internet illuminati:-)
the problem is that the competent foks that contribute these free
reference implementations often vehemently refuse to work on some of
the aforesaid military strength and intelligence operating system
platforms....


-------------->

reading `breaking the code` and 'talking it over' by julian barnes, the
following possible application of the extreme power of automatic
brute force computing to code breaking occured to me:
suppose one had enough examples of coded messages (note, coded, not
enciphered) so that statisitcal analysis made it possible to make
analyses of the kind:
"this was coded using shakespeares "romeo & juliet" where 1 = letter
1 of word one of scene 1 etc...(for instance)
well, suppose one went further, and was able to make statistcal
statements like:
"today is tuesday and they always use MacBeth on tuesdays for codeing"
well, taking this one step further, one day, someone discovers that
although the messages from the "enemy" are correcvtly decoded, it is
quite clear that "Othello" is not by shakespeare (at lest not by the
same shakespeare as the other codebooks were"
:-)
this has been a free plotware foundation donation to the colective
subconscious...


I thought a nice structure for a really nerdy (read "cult") book would
be about someone debugging shareware code found on the net, finding a
message hidden in a comment, which refers to some consipracy, e.g. by
some large software house to impoverish all the world by locking all
the users into using some large development program all centered
around a single OS ( e.g. generic theme of shrinking gene pool)
but secretly about to release a completely different OS with a new set
of apps (end of dinosaurs)....meanwhile the book would be structured
like a structured walk through and re-design (and would itself suffer
fro msecond system syndrome).....it would abound with references to
secret organisations (the dia, mossad, npd), and would have lots of
spurious website links (a few of which might work occasionally as part
of the promotion of the book)
like snowcrash, it would be essentiual to have a happy ending (perhaps
the earth enters a solar flare which renders all computers useless for
example...)
anyone wanna read it?

--------------

from the Free Plotware Foundation, another short series of
science friction minitales...
1/ in Georgia State University, scientists working in the Human Genome
project discover the gene that causes the terrible disfiguring disease
common amogst humans that makes their skin coloured - the state
government immediately siezes the work on the basis that removing
this from the race would elimiate the supply of low cost farm
labour...
2/ in Boston University, scientists working in the Human Genome
Project discover the gene that causes the terrible disfiguring
disease common amogst humans that makes their skin white. two of the
noble researchers test a treatment based on it on themselves but
are arrested for vagrancy while on vacation in south carolina.
3/ in the University of California at Berkeley, scientists working in
the Human Genome Project discover the gene that causes the terrible disease
common amogst humans that makes them racist, but refuse to release it
on the grounds that there are some people who might add this gene to
the race rather than eliminate it.
4/ in the university of life, nature finds a way to elimiate the gene
from the human race that causes people to work on genetics....

-------------
from the free plotware foundation, another chiller
Were-house
By day, its a storage facility
By night, once in a blue moon, its a frat house,
scene for Scream 3...
coming to a small scream near you real soon now...

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

beneath the planet of the bicyclists
so early in the 21st century, this guy invents a warp speed bicycle
and on his first test run, it goes otu of control when he is struck
by an odd sub-light speed vehicle that looks a lot like the train at
the end of back-to-the future
anyhow, he wakes up in a street at dusk, and sees a bunch of nasty
looking critters in some rusty old vehicles - gist of the plot is that
these are all mutants who live on a new atmospherre of methane and gas
fumes...and have extra large lungs and weedy legs just fit for pushing
down o nthe gas pedal - he esapcves down a dusty subway where he is
led to safety by some other odd critters with ultra-powerful lergs and
very thick craniums.....
near the end of his journeys, he discovers and old reel-to-real movie
and manages to play it by strapping it over the cogs on an old
bike...and finds that , yes, he is on planet earth - in fact he is in
paris, where the year is now 17890 AD; the human race has split into 4
parts
moto-reests
and
bi-psych-leests
are the main two species - the former are evolved to cope with the
intense heat and poor lite in nightime, whilst the latter are now able
to withstand 30Mbps impact from the former's vehicles....
two further subspecies exist where there is a marked gender
dominance in the mixture - in london, it is said that the moto are
dominant male.....
rumour has it that in far off california, hot-air-balloneests
have evolved whilst a strange cult of creatures from the area aroudn
the tigris-euphrates valley have started getting around by
WALKING ON THEIR HIND LEGS
again....
to be continued



beneath the planet of the bicyclists
so early in the 21st century, this guy invents a warp speed bicycle
and on his first test run, it goes otu of control when he is struck
by an odd sub-light speed vehicle that looks a lot like the train at
the end of back-to-the future
anyhow, he wakes up in a street at dusk, and sees a bunch of nasty
looking critters in some rusty old vehicles - gist of the plot is that
these are all mutants who live on a new atmospherre of methane and gas
fumes...and have extra large lungs and weedy legs just fit for pushing
down o nthe gas pedal - he esapcves down a dusty subway where he is
led to safety by some other odd critters with ultra-powerful lergs and
very thick craniums.....
near the end of his journeys, he discovers and old reel-to-real movie
and manages to play it by strapping it over the cogs on an old
bike...and finds that , yes, he is on planet earth - in fact he is in
paris, where the year is now 17890 AD; the human race has split into 4
parts
moto-reests
and
bi-psych-leests
are the main two species - the former are evolved to cope with the
intense heat and poor lite in nightime, whilst the latter are now able
to withstand 30Mbps impact from the former's vehicles....
two further subspecies exist where there is a marked gender
dominance in the mixture - in london, it is said that the moto are
dominant male.....
rumour has it that in far off california, hot-air-balloneests
have evolved whilst a strange cult of creatures from the area aroudn
the tigris-euphrates valley have started getting around by
WALKING ON THEIR HIND LEGS
again....
to be continued

:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

post-deconstructing the code?

reading `breaking the code` and 'talking it over' by julian barnes, the
following possible application of the extreme power of automatic
brute force computing to code breaking occured to me:
suppose one had enough examples of coded messages (note, coded, not
enciphered) so that statisitcal analysis made it possible to make
analyses of the kind:
"this was coded using shakespeares "romeo & juliet" where 1 = letter
1 of word one of scene 1 etc...(for instance)
well, suppose one went further, and was able to make statistcal
statements like:
"today is tuesday and they always use MacBeth on tuesdays for codeing"
well, taking this one step further, one day, someone discovers that
although the messages from the "enemy" are correcvtly decoded, it is
quite clear that "Othello" is not by shakespeare (at lest not by the
same shakespeare as the other codebooks were"
:-)
this has been a free plotware foundation donation to the colective
subconscious...