In the 1950's the United States Government published an interesting little tract called "How to Spot a Communist." Since hearing about it, I spent much time looking for a copy of the pamphlet. Although I still don't have a copy of it, I found that it was a part of the reading material for a U.S. history course at Virginia Wesleyan College, and transcribed it from the materials provided by them. I've recovered the transcription, which was originally on an April 2007 entry on this site, and it can be found in the extended entry.

A reader also wrote in to mention that there was once an old movie by the same name shown in grade schools in the late '50s or early '60s. If anyone finds it available for download or viewing, let me know... 

A communist ripoff of Rip Van Winkle, Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward:2000-1887" stars 1887-er Julian West, who wakes up to find himself in the year 2000. The protagonist then writes a book describing this horrific new world, somehow considered by himself and Bellamy to be a "paradise." In this brave new world there is no money and no organization of social classes. Though it seems to respect individual identity to a greater degree than other socialist movements, like in any such philosophy it is ultimately a great pretense. And yet the individuals in Bellamy's story feign happiness and are somehow prevented from suicide by the government or some other aspect of the social structure.

Let's get real, though. I am not a drop in a sea of humanity, nor am I somehow mystically connected to every other human being. Screw the socialists; It ain't so and we all know it. There are no cops nor prisons in Bellamy's fantasy, yet somehow those who reject the social order are placed into solitary confinement and fed on bread and water. This would include any of us who would seek to preserve our individual identities. No, Bellamy doesn't want a violent revolution, but he does have a sick way of dealing with his ideological opponents (which is yet somehow inspiring, if I say so myself).

Some programs, alas, still aren't IPv6 friendly. And Fedora Core 6 likes to have only an IPv6 entry for localhost in its hosts file. This can cause a problem with those few programs, wxMaxima (or xmaxima or any other fancy interface to Maxima) in particular (hpssd.py also had some problems in FC6 test releases, but seems to have been fixed). You may be getting the message "Maxima started, waiting for connection..." and shortly thereafter "Maxima process terminated." Check your /etc/hosts file. You'll probably find the line:

::1 localhost.localdomain localhost

But Maxima wants:

127.0.0.1 localhost

No problem, just add it in there. Now start up wxMaxima, or if it's already running select the Maxima menu and click "Restart maxima." Check it out! wxMaxima works just like you've always wanted!

Hopefully the problem gets fixed sooner than later, but for the present this provides a usable workaround...

UPDATE: Ubuntu users facing this problem are in luck as well: Karin writes in: Thanks! Worked for me too. I installed Ubuntu 6.10, Maxima 5.9.3, Wxmaxima 0.6.5.