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Indeed. Machiavelli laid this out in The Prince centuries ago. It's a very readable book, I recommend it.
That's why it's kind of mind-boggling to see the US fail so miserably in its imperialist occupation in Iraq. The part where they disbanded the Iraqi army instead of giving them at least tokens of power is especially laughable in this respect; it shows that Bush, along with his merry band of war criminals, is most certainly as stupid and ignorant as he looks.

However, as an entire movement, they've managed to convince me that it isn't primarily greed that's motivating them, rather the genuine ideological conviction that culture and information should be accessible and free to anyone who seeks it out.

You might be interested in this site, Project Gutenberg, or perhaps for helping out the cause, it's companion site, Distributed Proofreaders.

Short background: Project Gutenberg is a "digital printing press" for all works that have fallen into the public domain. (They will "soon" run out of material to digitize, since nothing has hit the public domain since 1923. "Soon" could be decades, but Eldred didn't win in the Supreme Court, so expect more copyright extensions...)

I've read Einstein, Mark Twain, Leonardo DaVinci, Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, and many others without risking violating copyright while reading on my Palm. Highly recommend them! I now understand the two Theories of Relativity, which is no small feat. :) I recommend Plucker as the reader, it's also open source (GPL).

To the great Variety of Readers. From the most able, to him that can but spell : There you are number'd. We had rather you were weighd. Especially, when the fate of all Bookes depends upon your capacities : and not of your heads alone, but of your purses. Well ! It is now publique, & you wil stand for your priviledges wee know : to read, and censure. Do so, but buy it first. That doth best commend a Booke, the Stationer saies. Then, how odde soever your braines be, or your wisedomes, make your licence the same, and spare not. Judge your six-pen'orth, your shillings worth, your five shillings worth at a time, or higher, so you rise to the just rates, and welcome. But, whatever you do, Buy. Censure will not drive a Trade, or make the Jacke go. And though you be a Magistrate of wit, and sit on the Stage at Black-Friers, or the Cock-pit, to arraigne Playes dailie, know, these Playes have had their triall alreadie, and stood out all Appeales ; and do now come forth quitted rather by a Decree of Court, then any purchas'd Letters of commendation.

Poor man's ebook reader:
Palm V off ebay (~$20)
Plucker/eReader format books:
http://ereader.com/ ($3 to $23 each)
http://gutenberg.org/ (free!)
Works remarkably well, not terribly easy on the eyes though.

Hell, what would they think about Max and Moritz ? It is still somewhat popular in German speaking countries and makes classic Sesame Street look like teletubbies (Which are mad fun to watch when you are on weed).

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/17161

Or you can get a ton of them for free, legally:

http://www.baen.com/library/
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

Information isn't just for pirates any more.

Hmm, that sounds very interesting, and very close to what I was thinking about this. I wrote a short story which summarizes the concept, it is called "Intelligence grows on trees". Basically, it is the same thing, but the difference is that I consider one's ability to "measure" possible outcomes to be proportional with one's intelligence, rather than one's level of optimism.

In other words, it's not a matter of feeling positive or negative about something, but a matter of being able to predict that event. Some things are "feeling-agnostic" and there is no reason for us to feel bad or good about them; emotions should not be involved.

Optimism or pessimism is a high-level protocol, stacked on top of other things. Reality does not care how you feel about it, so in the end you are a "winner" if you can rationally deal with things, rather than emotionally treat them as good/bad.

You might also be interested in this book, which is very good: The brain - a decoded enigma. And there are a couple of other examples on my site, which illustrate how math can be applied to life (most of the stories are about social relationships).


I've always considered myself an optimist, yet I always try to find potential flaws in all my plans which means (according to the author of the book you mentioned) that I am a pessimist. Could that be true? Or maybe we are dealing with different definitions for 'optimism' and 'pessimism'.

I thought this could have a connection with music; so I made a little experiment, and created an account on last.fm, to see what statistics says about my favourite music. It turns out that Moby's "Why does my heart feel so bad?" (along with other similar songs by Moby) is top rated in my list. Hmmm.. so... am I still an optimist?

I hope it comes close enough to hitch a ride!

Read Jules Verne "Off on a Comet", at Gutenburg

Decent story if you can get past the antisemitism.

Best of all -- it's free (as in beer and in speech).

For those who don't like paypal there are several other options available as well: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:Project_Gutenberg_Needs_Your_Donation

There is a PayPal link on the main site: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

And I think that Project Gutenberg is one of the best initiatives on the Internet.
Where else could you get, for free, electronic versions of books in the public domain? And they provide multiple file formats as well.

Project Gutenberg - the first and largest single collection of free electronic books - has volunteered to host IMSLP's (International Music Score Library Project) collection of scores.

Related story: Provider of Free Public Domain Music Shuts Down

Props to Gutenberg. Donate if you can spare a few bucks.

Project Gutenberg - the first and largest single collection of free electronic books - has volunteered to host IMSLP's (International Music Score Library Project) collection of scores.

Related story: Provider of Free Public Domain Music Shuts Down

Props to Gutenberg. Donate if you can spare a few bucks.

It was in this way that he found out that in many districts of the vast Pacific coast, so strong is the wild, free love of justice in the hearts of the people, that whenever any secret and mysterious crime is committed, they say, "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall," and go straightway and swing a Chinaman.

At least give a link, especially to their torrent page.

Eventually the taxpayer pays for his own wiretapping. Oh the irony.

      He pays for his own incarceration, too. Perhaps you'd like this essay by Henry David Thoreau...

Four easy steps:

1. Turn off the TV
2. Pick up a book (preferably in public domain, consider having a peek at Project Gutenberg or your local public library
3......
4. Profit!

No, really -- it's a nice day outside.

I'll admit that I haven't read the bible from cover to cover yet, but I haven't seen anything in there that says rape, murder, and enslave.

It is a bit over the top, but here's a starting point: rape, murder, enslave. Ok, it's not telling you to do this, but it is most definitely documenting cases of God telling His people to do these things.

If you don't like the commentary, go right to the source, and that's not the only copy on Gutenberg. Look it up for yourself.

Now, go ahead and tell me I don't understand. I still say that being a rational being, I cannot trust, let alone worship, anything that is so obviously evil to me. That its reasons are beyond my comprehension is irrelevant -- most psychopaths have reasons I'll never understand, and you could easily argue Satan would be similarly beyond my comprehension. Assuming both exist, roughly as they are described in the Bible, which should I choose? Because it's not obvious.

Looking at the version of the King James Bible on gutenberg.org (the only one I have access to right now), I see that in Genesis 6:15, God tells Noah to build an ark 30 cubits high. Later on, Genesis 7:20 says "Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered."

That means that had the ark stayed planted on the ground, the flood would only reach halfway up the side.

In addition, all the definitions I've seen for cubit put the length of a cubit around 0.4 to 0.7 meters. That means the ark was around 20 meters tall, and the flood was 10 meters high. Mighty small mountains to be covered by just 10 meters of water. If 1 story of a building is about 10 feet tall, that means you'd have to be on the 5th floor (with the 1st floor being on the ground) to avoid getting your feet wet. There probably weren't very many buildings that tall at the time specified in the Bible, but there were a lot of mountains that cleared 10 meters (Mt. Ararat, where some believe the ark to have settled, is over 5000 meters tall.)

One would think that if you've read the Bible several times, you might have noticed the contradiction right at the start, between Genesis 1 and 2. Gen 1 says that humans were created male and female on the 6th day, before God rested and after the animals of the earth(Gen 1:26-27); Gen 2 documents creation of first male human after God rested (Gen 2:5,7), then the creation of land animals (Gen 2:19), and finally the creation of female humans (Gen 2:21-22).

At maximum, only one of these sequences is correct, and the fact that both exist makes me wonder exactly where inerrantists start reading from.


(references: Vulgate and KJV; verse numbers are consistent)

One would think that if you've read the Bible several times, you might have noticed the contradiction right at the start, between Genesis 1 and 2. Gen 1 says that humans were created male and female on the 6th day, before God rested and after the animals of the earth(Gen 1:26-27); Gen 2 documents creation of first male human after God rested (Gen 2:5,7), then the creation of land animals (Gen 2:19), and finally the creation of female humans (Gen 2:21-22).

At maximum, only one of these sequences is correct, and the fact that both exist makes me wonder exactly where inerrantists start reading from.


(references: Vulgate and KJV; verse numbers are consistent)

True enough, but the statement really needs to be generalized:

XO isn't designed for sale, in any way. There is nothing proprietary about it. The software is all FOSS, and the hardware is basically patent-free. Under these conditions, there is no way for a would-be marketer to assure that his margins would be sufficient to recover his start-up costs.

The XO was designed through a very interesting process of contributed intellectual labor. There is literally no way to capitalize on that.

Just think, though. The XO will put the Gutenberg library of books into the hands of students for a fraction of the cost of buying and shipping the hardcopies of these classics.

In my grade 11 English class, we learned about the history of the English language. As part of this, we read a passage from Beowulf. After reading that, you truly understand that language does change from time to time. And what once was a rule, is now considered false. Read anything written more than 200 years ago, and you will see a very different language from what we have today. English isn't what a bunch of high-brows say it is, but rather the contrary. Languages like French (especially in Quebec) have committees to decide what is official French, and what it no. Meanwhile, English tends to accept any word which happens to be in use by a lot of people. Such as using "Google" as a verb.

If anyone is interested, here are several links to downloadable ebooks and manuals for using slide rules:

• Instruction for Using a Slide Rule by W. Stanley
• Elementary Lessons for Operating the Slide Rule
• Downloadable Manuals

My only experience with using a slide rule was back in the 1960s in an 8th grade math class where we spent two weeks learning to use slide rules. We were just 8th graders, but were able to use a few basic features of something that was normally used mostly by scientists and engineers. Mr. Turner, our math instructor, even wore a small slide rule as a tie clasp. I suspect that the use of slide rules was something that probably was not normally taught to 8th graders.

Later on in Junior College, I once thought about possibly taking a 1 credit slide rule class, but didn't. That was in the days back before pocket calculators. In the College Algebra class our textbook had Log tables, a square root table and various other tables in the appendixes in the back which we used to get answers without a pocket calculator (or a slide rule).

I still have my dad's old Ivory and wood slide rule that he bought back in the 1950s and also a more modern plastic slide rule which I later purchased. I am plan to briefly brush up on how to use them just for the heck of it.

I am no math expert, but am old enough to remember using a slide rule. Back in the mid-1960s, I was in a 8th grade math class where we were taught the basics of using a slide rule. Mr Turner, the math teacher even had a small slide-rule on his tie clip. Slide rules are now an obsolete technology that many younger people probably don't even know about. Inexpense pocket calculators have made them obsolete.

Later on I took a couple of Algebra courses in High School and later on at a Junior College. Instead of just using a pocket calculator, the back of the textbook had several large appendixes with tables for looking up the answers to logarithms, square roots and various other types of calculations. I was not like we could just use a pocket calculator to find the answer. If the exact number we were looking for was not in the table, we sometimes had to use interpelation to come up with an estimated answer based on the two nearest answers (not that I remember how to do that).

Back in the early 1970s (or late 1960s) I remember a cover of Popular Science Magazine with a headline about a pocket calculator for only about $800. Even more amazing was a another cover not too long after that with the headline about calculators for under $100. For $100 you could get a pocket calculator that could add, subtract, multiply and divide.

Here are a couple of slide rule links, although the link to the free book about using slide rules from Gutenberg.org, was down when I last tired it.

Slide Rule

Instruction for using a slide rule from Gutenberg.org or the alternate link to what appears to be the same book from Gutenberg Europe

There's still lots of fun stuff that can be done with Web 1.0... even on an iPhone. (shameless plug)

Actually, what I'd really like to see would be a return to true Web 1.0 roots--you know, device independence, things like that. To be honest, the iPhone's method of shrinking web pages is just a not-so-elegant workaround. It's nice sometimes, but I'd prefer it if the iPhone just reflowed plain pages like this to 320 pixels wide (without a viewport specified) like my Axim does.* (I say this as a happy iPhone owner and developer.)

* in landscape mode the iPhone just shows unstyled pages with no zoom, 480px wide, but in portrait mode it shrinks them. Which is fine for sites with columns but I wish it would just say "No styling info? Just show it at 1x" for really plain nothing-but-headings-and-paragraphs type pages.

From the article: "one popular use will be to load textbooks at 25 cents or so each on the laptops, which has a high-resolution screen for easy reading."

WHAT???? - What happened to the books at project gutenberg - http://www.gutenberg.org/ - Wikibooks at http://wikibooks.org/ from the Wikimedia project created with the mission to create a free collection of open-content textbooks.

http://www.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html- Myriads of Math Books!

To quote from the last site: "The writing of textbooks and making them freely available on the web is an idea whose time has arrived"

Please oh please - don't tell me they are attempting to monetize the OLPC by selling textbooks.

There is quality material out there - Make sure the OLPC's come with a comprehensive list of resources where to get quality textbooks and other educational material.

E.

Heinlein (and his successors) were extraordinarily diligent about renewing every single thing he ever wrote. If they hadn't been, you could read some examples that had fallen through the cracks and into the public domain, such as the works of: Poul Anderson, Marion Zimmer Bradley, John W. Campbell, Lester Del Rey, Harry Harrison, Damon Knight, Andre Norton, H. Beam Piper, Frederik Pohl, E. E. "Doc" Smith and Kurt Vonnegut.

Actually, it appears there may be one or two available shorts, the ones that he really, really hated and prevented from ever being republished. I may hit up my interlibrary loan department for that.

With an 8 GB memory stick.

Me : "Well, I have more than 20,000 titles here. I'd be happy to list them all for you. There's 'Het Geheimzinnige Eiland', by Jules Verne (#22580), 'Bread Overhead', by Fritz Reuter Leiber (#22579), ...

(hours and hours later...)

... Kennedy's Inaugural Address (#3), The Bill of Rights (#2), and the Declaration of Independence (#1)."

Agent : "Is that all?"

Me : "Yup! Oh, and 'The Catcher in the Rye'."

Agent : "One of those, are you? Take him in, boys!"

Or you could use a Sony Reader, too...

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

No, the Martian language is very different from Sumerian - please re-read the authoritative text for more information.

That's correct, enjoy them at Project Gutenberg or the Online Books Project at U Penn. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the one by Plumly ...

This sounds rather like a distortion of AT&Ts long distance network crash during January 1990. This is detailed pretty comprehensively in The Hacker Crackdown.

In short AT&Ts switching software at the time had issues if one switch recieved 2 calls within a certain time period (the full details are sketchy, it's been some time since I read the book) and point in its operation it would hand over its calls to another switch and reboot. Unfortunately it would also go down when other switches that previously rebooted attempted to reconnect while it was coming up. A chain reaction occured knocking out large portions of AT&Ts long distance network.

Badly told, but a quick search for 4ESS in the book gets a more detailed explanation for the interested.

There is a saying amongst psychologists that at some point, each must come up with a reason why humans are fundamentally different from the other animals, only for someone to eventually prove them wrong.

... is the way that, if you look at a plain-vanilla HTML page--one without a single table or div anywhere, like this ebook of The Invisible Man--it INSISTS on showing you a shrunken version that you've got to zoom in and scroll around to read, or turn the iPhone sideways. Why, when faced with such a page, can't it just present you a 100% view at 320px wide? Looking at plain pages like that (and yes, there are plenty, especially ones that I use for work--I've put lots of documentation online in the plainest possible format for the widest possible compatability) is one thing that works better on my Axim. That, and the fact that when you're doing lots and lots of reading, it is nice to just press a hardware button and scroll down exactly one page, rather than doing a finger-flick scroll.

Hmm... maybe Apple will release Boot Camp for the iPhone and let us dual-boot with Windows Mobile? :-) If not, it would be a cool hack to use the volume up/down buttons as page up/page down if no audio is playing.

Kropotkin had another take on Darwinism.

From Wikipedia's article on Mutual Aid: After examining the evidence of cooperation among the animals, the "savages", the "barbarians", in the medieval city, and in modern times, he concludes that cooperation and mutual aid are as important in the evolution of the species as competition and mutual strife, if not more important.

I went there http://www.openlibrary.org/toc.html. All I can see is maybe 20 book covers, most of them too small to read. There's no search tab or way to search the entire library (which AFAIK could be only 20 books anyway). The 'Table of Contents' tab is a list of sponsors, not books. There is a link to upload books, but that's it. This is how *not* to design a web site. If this is all they have, forget it. If this is a 20 book technology demonstrator, they're about to learn the 'Marimba' lesson: You only get one chance.

You'll do far better with Project Guttenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page has thousands of books, and (WOW!) the ability to search by author or title. If only OpenLibrary.org had thought of that...

Project Gutenberg has been in the business of hosting public domain books and other literary works for many years, long before either Google or this new thing. Gutenberg is much more of an "Open Source" project in that it is more distributed to volunteers. I wonder if there has been any coordiation between Gutenberg and these "big boy" projects?

Project Gutenberg

FTFA: It offers an experience designed to match paper: there's even a page-flipping animation as readers move forward and backward through the book.

I'm skeptical about the usefulness of that. There's nothing I hate more than having to wait for some animation before I can read more content.

Actually, my picking one example goes to the heart of the fallacy of simply using a big number to "prove" that there has to be something in there. It's wrong because, as my example shows, Gutenberg includes things people would never read. So you need to come up with an actual number of titles broken down by category. Until then, saying something like the original poster did is just ludicrous.

This would seem to imply that at least 3 people would read each thing that shows up there. Maybe not for entertainment, but there is such a thing as reference text. Personally, I didn't realize that genome information was in there due to PGs size... I might want to reference that text some day.

For comparison, my local library has 4 different books on how to use Microsoft Word 95 more efficently, and a few books introducing their readership to the concepts of 'mouse' and 'icon'. While your argument has some merit, libraries talk about the size of their collections all the time. While the original poster's comment might be a bit of a straw man, it definitely isn't ludicrous.

However, PG also has "bookshelves." Check out the Science Fiction Bookshelf for a listing of only SciFi entries available. There's a surprisingly large amount of good stuff hidden in there. PG also has pretty much anything you'd find in a Norton or Oxford English Lit anthology. I'd say that's pretty impressive.

http://www.europeana.eu/
http://www.liberliber.it/ (Italian language ... but have also classic music)
http://www.gutenberg.org/

http://www.babelteka.org/ (Italian language)

Yes, I particularly enjoyed Human Genome Project, Chromosome Number 08. Some fine reading there.

C'mon, I would be fairly disappointed with a library of 21,000 real books even if it contained only fiction from random authors from 1900-2000. Gutenberg doesn't even have that much depth.

That's not to take anything away from them. But to make claims about it being a good selection based on "21,000 - gee that's a big number" is a bit ludicrous.

Have these guys not heard of Project Gutenburg ?

It's been around for years, and I thought it was pretty well-known.

someone asked a good question on the website; how does this relate to Gutenburg?

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

they have a great collection of ebooks online already and your free to grab and share them. I wish that they would have the base for this though in a country which doesn't have insanely long copyright laws, then it could really add value over gutenburg

Everything about this "Open Library" - from the colors to the fonts used - looks just like Project Gutenberg. Am I missing an important difference?

Perhaps this is going to contain books still under copyright? I doubt the full text will be available, which makes this "library" pretty useless.

There's a shorter explanation here, The PG License. The legalese is mostly a royalty license for the Project Gutenberg name, which is a registered trademark. We made the preamble much shorter starting with book #10000. (Remember that in the early days, stuff like the GPL was also still new...lawyers wanted to "shrink wrap" the eBooks. These days, that seems stupid, but in the early 1990s things were different.)

You *can* remove the small print, etc. You *can* reuse the public domain titles in any way you choose, but if there are substantial changes (other than reformatting/repackaging) the PG name should be removed. You can't "trade" on the PG name without following the license or otherwise getting permission. That's partially so people can't abuse the PG name ("The official Project Gutenberg edition of Alice, for $13.95 postage paid!"). It's also because changes that PG didn't do, we might somehow be held responsible for or asked to support.

Conceptually, the PG "license" is almost the opposite of the GPL and such, even though the intention is very similar. The GPL gives a license to use something that is, and stays, copyrighted. The PG license is intended to very clearly state that an item is public domain, and that it may be used for any purpose at all...but it withholds permission to use the Project Gutenberg name except with an unchanged copy of the eBook (other than formatting and other minor changes). It also lists a royalty schedule for people who want to trade on the PG name...giving explicit permission to do so.

The preamble to all eBooks, for years, has been short and to the point: use it, share it, make copies, give it away, etc....

I know the license legalese is terrible, but we're in the same situation as people wanting to GPL their code or similar: we need to include it in each eBook, since each eBook needs to stand alone & complete.

We had 1/2 dozen lawyers with expertise in copyright confirm our No Sweat of the Brow Copyright statement for Project Gutenberg. It's what we rely on for harvesting GoogleBooks and many other sources. Here's the text:

Work performed on a public domain item, known as sweat of the brow, does not result in a new copyright. This is the judgment of Project Gutenberg's copyright lawyers, and is founded in a study of case law in the United States. This is founded in the notion of authorship, which is a prerequisite for a new copyright. Non-authorship activities do not create a new copyright.

Some organizations erroneously claim a new copyright when they add value to a public domain item, such as to an old printed book. But despite the difficulty of the work involved, none of these activities result in new copyright protection when performed on a public domain item:

        * scanning and optical character recognition (OCR)
        * proofreading and OCR error correction
        * fixing spelling and typography, including substantial updates to spelling such as changing from American to British English
        * adding markup (HTML, XML, TeX, etc.)
        * digitizing, cropping, color-adjusting or other modifications to images
        * addition of trivial new content, such as images to indicate page breaks in an HTML file, or pictures of gothic letters for the first letter in a chapter, or adding or removing a few words per chapter
        * substantial reorganization, such as moving footnotes to end-notes, or changing the locations of pictures within the text
        * recoding to new character sets, such as Unicode, or new formats, such as PDF

There is some value-added content that DOES get a new copyright, but only for the actual new work (that is, it may be possible to remove the new copyrighted content to go back to a public domain document):

        * translation into another human language
        * creating a new compilation of existing materials (though the individual items compiled retain their public domain status)
        * creating new original art work
        * creating an original derivative work, such as an audio performance, a new chapter, or a set of favorite quotations
        * adding a new introduction or critical essay

Project Gutenberg is able to utilize any material which is judged to be public domain in the country of use (i.e., the United States). If it is determined that components of an item are public domain, but others are not, then the copyrighted components may be removed without the permission of whoever owns the copyright for the new content.

It is Project Gutenberg's practice to seek permission of those who distribute materials, including copyright claimants, before harvesting their materials. This is done in order to be polite, and to allow the producer or distributor to request a particular credit be used. But if permission is not given, public domain items can still be used by Project Gutenberg, typically without any attribution. Because Project Gutenberg receives submissions from many different sources, it is not always clear where an item came from. Volunteers who submit content they did not themselves generate should be diligent about reporting sources, even if the source will not be credited in the item as distributed by Project Gutenberg.