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We did an analysis of the "whole penguin" collection found on Amazon a few years ago. Pretty well everything is in Project Gutenberg.

You can help create the next eBook, to your own exacting standards. Try starting at Distributed Proofreaders -- Greg

You also have to be careful about what sheet music you are using. There are projects that distribute properly free sheet music:
http://www.mutopiaproject.org/
http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_Sheet_ Music_Project
http://www.cpdl.org/
http://www.imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page
http://icking-music-archive.org/

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1232

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall. Proverbs 16:18

...but isn't it about time that the concept of the public library was taken online? And I don't mean just public domain works, like Project Gutenberg is doing (though of course, if the copyright term weren't so long, public domain only would be viable), but for-real honest-to-god reading books, promoting public literacy, online.

Otherwise it appears that the Church has so little faith in their own message that they have to use a secular government to enforce their views.

Now, I don't know about anyone else, but as an American schoolchild I was taught from an early age that this was wicked, evil and one of the main motivating factors for the American Revolution. Honestly, it's an alien concept over here. Imagine if George W. Bush were not just president but had as one of his titles "Defender of the Faith" as head of state. Note that in the U.S. we call parts of government "Departments" while in England they are called "Ministries."

So, actually, Sony is in luck in this case. Th CoE is pretty decadent, and has to resort to suing in court like a common nobody, instead of just ordering the Sony people to be drawn and quartered for treason, blasphemy and whatever other crimes they could come up with.

Penny for the Guy?

Oh, and I really wonder if using an artistic recreation of a state building could ever be forbidden in the U. S. under the First Amendment... but England has no such Amendment or indeed, a Constitution.

I leave you with this quote:

The decapitated colossus reeled like a drunken giant; but it did not fall over. It recovered its balance by a miracle, and, no longer heeding its steps and with the camera that fired the Heat-Ray now rigidly upheld, it reeled swiftly upon Shepperton. The living intelligence, the Martian within the hood, was slain and splashed to the four winds of heaven, and the Thing was now but a mere intricate device of metal whirling to destruction. It drove along in a straight line, incapable of guidance. It struck the tower of Shepperton Church, smashing it down as the impact of a battering ram might have done, swerved aside, blundered on and collapsed with tremendous force into the river out of my sight. -- The War of the Worlds by Herbert George Wells

Lobbying = Freedom of Assembly + Freedom of Speech

This might seem like inexpensive representation. $2000 to influence a vote. From the elected official's position it works like one of those diagrams cuts of beef. Slice of RIAA, slice of Big Oil slice of Greenpeace, etc. Selling your position piecemeal is quite lucrative.

There are over 20,000 legal, DRM-free books available here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/

And the rest are on Usenet. ;-)

I prefer reading printed books but don't have room for very many on my bookshelf , so to save space, ebooks are a good alternative. I have sometimes had to throw out old books to make room for new ones. Of course, I always felt guilty doing that, but I did not know what else to do with them. Instead of doing that, I could easily fit an entire library of many thousands of books on one small hard drive. There are may older books, in which the copyrights have expired, as well as some occasional newer books which for various reasons are available in ebook form for free.

• Project Gutenberg
• Arthur's Classic Novels
• ManyBooks.net
• Baen Free Library
• Cory Doctorow's Free Books

I do buy occasional newer printed books too, which are not available for free, so I am still doing my share of helping to support the publishing industry.

Never said anything about sharing, DRM, or terrorism. I've never bought an ebook, nor do I read commercial ebooks. I used to whine about how hard to find good books were, until I started looking at the internet at Creative Commons and other free formats. Now, I only buy books that are worth buying, and just for the sake of keeping a hard copy for my library.

I have never read The Jungle or the Heart of Darkness either, although I did read Brave new world. Would they be would be worthwhile for me to read sometime to fill in a few gaps in my education? I see that both books are available as free downloads from Gutenberg.org.

• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

I went to school back in the 1960's in California. I was not very interested in history at the time and did not study very much. It wasn't until I was an adult that I become more interested in history and wanted to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge of history. Some of the programs on PBS and the history channel have been a start for me. I don't remember exactly how well history was taught when I was in school. If we skip or gloss over everything that is controversial or which might offend someone's religious, political or economic beliefs, then we would loose many of the most important lessons of history. Would history still be of any value then? In a democracy, we need well educated voters not a bunch of ignoramuses.

Since we are talking about teachers and history, here is something I remember from when I was in grade school in about the 4th or 5th grade. I remember being lined getting ready up for our morning flag salute and pledge of allegiance. It must of been when Martin Luther King had just been killed (I am not sure if the flag was at half-mast or not). As we stood there, I remember our teacher just telling us that Martin Luther King was just a criminal who had been arrested. Another teacher standing nearby quickly became angry and got in an argument with her and said "is that what you teach your students?" At the time I didn't hardly know what they were talking about.

I have never read The Jungle or the Heart of Darkness either, although I did read Brave new world. Would they be would be worthwhile for me to read sometime to fill in a few gaps in my education? I see that both books are available as free downloads from Gutenberg.org.

• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
• Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

I went to school back in the 1960's in California. I was not very interested in history at the time and did not study very much. It wasn't until I was an adult that I become more interested in history and wanted to fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge of history. Some of the programs on PBS and the history channel have been a start for me. I don't remember exactly how well history was taught when I was in school. If we skip or gloss over everything that is controversial or which might offend someone's religious, political or economic beliefs, then we would loose many of the most important lessons of history. Would history still be of any value then? In a democracy, we need well educated voters not a bunch of ignoramuses.

Since we are talking about teachers and history, here is something I remember from when I was in grade school in about the 4th or 5th grade. I remember being lined getting ready up for our morning flag salute and pledge of allegiance. It must of been when Martin Luther King had just been killed (I am not sure if the flag was at half-mast or not). As we stood there, I remember our teacher just telling us that Martin Luther King was just a criminal who had been arrested. Another teacher standing nearby quickly became angry and got in an argument with her and said "is that what you teach your students?" At the time I didn't hardly know what they were talking about.

If you forget your college experience within a couple of years of graduating, it obvioulsy didn't scar you deeply enough to make a difference.

I did my undergrad at CalTech. I'll never forget. I still break out in goosebumps and my mouth goes dry every time I hear "The Ride of the Valkyries." I just finished my first year of law school, and it was like tiddlywinks compared to Tech.

[...] remember your Einstein.

There are two books of his freely downloadable from Project Gutenberg:

Relativity : the Special and General Theory

Sidelights on Relativity

I've read the former. Amazingly insightful, and approachable as well. The two examples stick with you: on a train traveling next to a platform, drop a stone and observe from a point on the train versus a point on the platform; and a man in outer space, in an opaque cubic box with a string attached to one surface; if someone pulls it at 9.8 m/(s*s), then the man experiences exactly what he would experience if the box were on the surface of the Earth. (Special and General, respectively.)

[...] remember your Einstein.

There are two books of his freely downloadable from Project Gutenberg:

Relativity : the Special and General Theory

Sidelights on Relativity

I've read the former. Amazingly insightful, and approachable as well. The two examples stick with you: on a train traveling next to a platform, drop a stone and observe from a point on the train versus a point on the platform; and a man in outer space, in an opaque cubic box with a string attached to one surface; if someone pulls it at 9.8 m/(s*s), then the man experiences exactly what he would experience if the box were on the surface of the Earth. (Special and General, respectively.)

From Upton Sinclair's The Jungle:

"Worst of any, however, were the fertilizer men, and those who served in the cooking rooms. These people could not be shown to the visitor,--for the odor of a fertilizer man would scare any ordinary visitor at a hundred yards, and as for the other men, who worked in tank rooms full of steam, and in some of which there were open vats near the level of the floor, their peculiar trouble was that they fell into the vats; and when they were fished out, there was never enough of them left to be worth exhibiting,--sometimes they would be overlooked for days, till all but the bones of them had gone out to the world as Durham's Pure Leaf Lard! "

That's the direct reference. Also note:

"There were the men in the pickle rooms, for instance, where old Antanas had gotten his death; scarce a one of these that had not some spot of horror on his person. Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one. Of the butchers and floorsmen, the beef-boners and trimmers, and all those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count them or to trace them. They would have no nails,--they had worn them off pulling hides; their knuckles were swollen so that their fingers spread out like a fan. There were men who worked in the cooking rooms, in the midst of steam and sickening odors, by artificial light; in these rooms the germs of tuberculosis might live for two years, but the supply was renewed every hour. There were the beef-luggers, who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerator-cars; a fearful kind of work, that began at four o'clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years. There were those who worked in the chilling rooms, and whose special disease was rheumatism; the time limit that a man could work in the chilling rooms was said to be five years. There were the wool-pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with their bare hands, till the acid had eaten their fingers off. There were those who made the tins for the canned meat; and their hands, too, were a maze of cuts, and each cut represented a chance for blood poisoning. Some worked at the stamping machines, and it was very seldom that one could work long there at the pace that was set, and not give out and forget himself and have a part of his hand chopped off."

Do you think that all those lost digits were fished out of the machinery?

Before the FDA, there was *no* regulation whatsoever on food or drugs. States and municipalities might have them, but if not, what happened in the slaughterhouse stayed in the slaughterhouse.

I'm glad they're time-like dimentions! I'd hate to find out they're orthogonal directions, and suddenly have to worry about all my organs spilling out into the v and w dimensions. Or start filling a glass with water, only to discover I have to keep pouring until I had 1/8pi*r^4*height units of water. It'd just be inconvenient!

Speaking of which, anyone interested in some rather funny dimensional hijinks, you might want to check out Flatland the classic book, or one of the movies being made about the story.

Ryan Fenton

that I found on Gutenberg - right after reading most of the comments in this discussion - titled "The Man of Letters as a Man of Business" http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3388/ by William Dean Howells
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Dean_Howells/ certainly resonates with my own felings and observations - from what I have read thus far - on the entire realm that this discussion addresses.

From the book:

"Literature is Business as well as Art."

"Public whose taste is so crude that they cannot enjoy the best."

MRH

I've owned a Treo 300, 600 and 700. I've read PDF's on all of them.

HOWEVER: It is not easy. The best is the 700. The high-res screen (320x320) makes a big difference. But even then, you're talking about using a device that has a screen that's 2 inches x 2 inches to try to read a document formatted for 8.5 x 11. The whole idea of a PDF is to preserve precise paper-based formatting. Working with that on a handheld is awkward at best.

Your best option is to convert the PDF to text and read the text on the PDF, using some sort of eReader (Plucker or ,A HREF="http://www.isilo.com/">iSilo come to mind). I read lots of PG material that way, as well as IBM Redbooks that I've converted to text.

Project Gutenberg uses plenty of scans from American Memory to make their etexts--they do pretty much what you describe. At the lowest level, they make a plaintext copy, but they also do formatting and in-text hyperlinking: for instance, linking footnotes to their references, or index page numbers to anchors in the text. (See the HTML version of this etext to see what I mean.) Browse to a random book from this random collection, and you'll see what the LoC provides for their collections currently. As Brewster Kahle will be involved, you might want to see what projects he's done and how they're provided: a random book from the Million Book Project is available as a DjVu document, as well (badly) OCR'd text.

LXXXI. Caesar had warning given him of his fate by indubitable omens. A few months before, when the colonists settled at Capua, by virtue of the Julian law, were demolishing some old sepulchres, in building country-houses, and were the more eager at the work, because they discovered certain vessels of antique workmanship, a tablet of brass was found in a tomb, in which Capys, the founder of Capua, was said to have been buried, with an inscription in the Greek language to this effect "Whenever the bones of Capys come to be discovered, a descendant of Iulus will be slain by the hands of his kinsmen, and his death revenged by fearful disasters throughout Italy." Lest any person should regard this anecdote as a fabulous or silly invention, it was circulated upon the authority of Caius Balbus, an intimate friend of Caesar's. A few days likewise before his death, he was informed that the horses, which, upon his crossing the Rubicon, he had consecrated, and turned loose to graze without a keeper, abstained entirely from eating, and shed floods of tears. The soothsayer Spurinna, observing certain ominous appearances in a sacrifice which he was offering, advised him to beware of some danger, which threatened to befall him before the ides of March were past. The day before the ides, birds of various kinds from a neighbouring grove, pursuing a wren which flew into Pompey's senate-house 94, with a sprig of laurel in its beak, tore it in pieces. Also, in the night on which the day of his murder dawned, he dreamt at one time that he was soaring above the clouds, and, at another, that he had joined hands with Jupiter. His wife Calpurnia fancied in her sleep that the pediment of the house was falling down, and her husband stabbed on her bosom; immediately upon which the chamber doors flew open. On account of these omens, as well as his infirm health, he was in some doubt whether he should not remain at home, and defer to some other opportunity the business which he intended to propose to the senate; but Decimus Brutus advising him not to disappoint the senators, who were numerously assembled, and waited his coming, he was prevailed upon to go, and accordingly set forward about the fifth hour. In his way, some person having thrust into his hand a paper, warning him against the plot, he mixed it with some other documents which he held in his left hand, intending to read it at leisure. Victim after victim was slain, without any favourable appearances in the entrails; but still, disregarding all omens, he entered the senate-house, laughing at Spurinna a

Tolkien even copied the final dialogue between the hero and his sword:

Kullerwoinen, wicked wizard,
Grasps the handle of his broadsword,
Asks the blade this simple question:
"Tell me, O my blade of honor,
Dost thou wish to drink my life-blood,
Drink the blood of Kullerwoinen?"
Thus his trusty sword makes answer,
Well divining his intentions:
Why should I not drink thy life-blood,
Blood of guilty Kullerwoinen,
Since I feast upon the worthy,
Drink the life-blood of the righteous?"

But then, Tolkien never published the story so it's not fair to accuse him of plagiarism.

---

Karl Marx famously wrote in his Communist Manifesto in 1888:

But, you will say, we destroy the most hallowed of relations, when we replace home education by social.

Let the common school be expanded to its capabilities, let it be worked with the efficiency of which it is susceptible, and nine-tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete; the long catalogue of human ills would be abridged

Whenever we have in mind the discussion of a new movement in education, it is especially necessary to take the broader, or social view.

the modern education is supposed to make kids fit better into society, so how come they are bigger misfits then any generation before them?

Actually, Moby Dick is in the public domain , but I get what you mean.

Most people have put "30 days of Vista" off until after they finish "Two Years Before the Mast" and 120 Days of Sodom.

It's called "satire." (And parody, of course.) I haven't liked it historically--although I do remember a fun article in a british pamphlet from a while back about duelling. "Please, sir, show up at half-past ten in front of the convenience store so that we might stick swords in each other." Something like that... In any event, Colbert is the more recent example. The Colbert Report satirizes O'Reilly, and O'Reilly would certainly shut Colbert down if he could. Satire and Parody is one of the few parts of the constitution that has actually remained pretty powerful--that particular application of free speech laws. This is something that the U.S. does right.

While I don't think he actually used the word Charles Darwin had this to say:

'Let us now see whether the several facts and rules relating to the geological succession of organic beings, better accord with the common view of the immutability of species, or with that of their slow and gradual modification, through descent and natural selection', Charles Darwin.

'evolution is generally associated that there is an advancement, or the "thing" becomes better in our view'

That's a common misconception, if you don't mind me saying so. Actually evolution refers to species adapting to their environment through natural selection where the less sucessful members die off as they don't get to pass on their genes. The religious object as if you follow it to its logical conclusion evolution can account for the emergence of humanity, consequently there is no need of a man in Rome telling us what God thinks.

'In a scientific study review, using the word evolve is like me saying the program I wrote got better'

In mammals at fertilization, a zygote is formed from the fusion of a sperm and egg. Each contributes half the genetic information required to grow. At the first cell division chromosomes are randomly selected from each parent. This process as well as gradual random movement of the position of certain DNA sequences and mutations are the mechanism by which offsprings change and adapt to environmental pressures. That's why children are not identical, except for twins of course. How the genetic information from those two particular cells got there is decided by the environment. As such the species as a whole is better adapted to a particular environment. Terms like advancement or better are an antromorphism, that is reading into nature human values and intentions.

Finally the scientific method observes specific phenomena, draws up conclusions and then tests it with experiment. An experiment is only successful if it repeatidly gives the same results. As such giving creationism equal time with evolution is nonsensical, as God is a transcendental entity, can't be measured and can do miracles which would void any results.

was Re:Evolution is not a specific scientific term

e-books have been tried, and they've failed. They will continue to fail until we somehow figure out a way to make an e-book that looks, feels, and behaves exactly like a real book. Good luck with that.

The worship of images had stolen into the church by insensible degrees, and each petty step was pleasing to the superstitious mind, as productive of comfort, and innocent of sin. But in the beginning of the eighth century, in the full magnitude of the abuse, the more timorous Greeks were awakened by an apprehension, that under the mask of Christianity, they had restored the religion of their fathers: they heard, with grief and impatience, the name of idolaters; the incessant charge of the Jews and Mahometans, who derived from the Law and the Koran an immortal hatred to graven images and all relative worship. The servitude of the Jews might curb their zeal, and depreciate their authority; but the triumphant Mussulmans, who reigned at Damascus, and threatened Constantinople, cast into the scale of reproach the accumulated weight of truth and victory.

How about a free link to Xenophon's Anabasis. No need to buy a book that was written over 1500 years ago. Talk about expired copyright...

Sucky (less than 10 hour) battery-life.

So you get two batteries. I don't know about you, but I don't sit around reading the same book for 10 hours straight.

Small storage (less than a few GB)

If you're storing books in BloatyDRM or PDF format, sure, that's a problem. If they're just text, though, shouldn't matter -- check out Gutenberg for some fairly small files, and keep in mind that English text generally compresses by about an order of magnitude without even trying.

Poor readability in brigth ligth (such as in a sunlit park)

E-Ink should fix this. (Or whatever they're calling it now.)

Proprietary one-off file-formats rather than good support for standard ones (html, pdf)

I solve these by sticking to text, and/or putting Linux on them.

Tiny screen... Miniscule resolution...

Ah, true. E-Ink may help with these, but it was never really a concern for me. Frankly, the only reason I'd want a bigger screen is to be able to read with my glasses off, which probably isn't healthy anyway.

Ok, so maybe these don't matter to you, and are all trumped by bookmarks.

• Bookmarks
• Searchability
• Organization
• Backups

I could probably think of more, but that should be enough for now. Thing is, I never lose data, but I can easily lose physical things. I've never actually lost a laptop, but I have lost books (and found them years later).

You can still find 20-year old documents from the BBS era on the Internet because people found value in them and kept reposting them.

20 years is nothing. Project Gutenberg's first texts date from 1971.

Mark Twain wrote of a man lacking a conscience in The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut:

... "Out of this with your paupers, your charities, your reforms, your pestilent morals! You behold before you a man whose life-conflict is done, whose soul is at peace; a man whose heart is dead to sorrow, dead to suffering, dead to remorse; a man WITHOUT A CONSCIENCE! In my joy I spare you, though I could throttle you and never feel a pang! Fly!"

She fled. Since that day my life is all bliss. Bliss, unalloyed bliss. Nothing in all the world could persuade me to have a conscience again. I settled all my old outstanding scores, and began the world anew. I killed thirty-eight persons during the first two weeks--all of them on account of ancient grudges. I burned a dwelling that interrupted my view. I swindled a widow and some orphans out of their last cow, which is a very good one, though not thoroughbred, I believe. I have also committed scores of crimes, of various kinds, and have enjoyed my work exceedingly, whereas it would formerly have broken my heart and turned my hair gray, I have no doubt.

Available on-line via both file download and html text.

Once again, Art anticipates Science!

Alternatives:

Project Gutenberg - 20,000 books free for downloading - listing in zip format, rss feed of latest releases

... and for other books ...

Interesting - the Kamasutra by Vatsyayana is currently the top book today, yesterday, this week, and for the last month.

Alternatives:

Project Gutenberg - 20,000 books free for downloading - listing in zip format, rss feed of latest releases

... and for other books ...

Interesting - the Kamasutra by Vatsyayana is currently the top book today, yesterday, this week, and for the last month.

Alternatives:

Project Gutenberg - 20,000 books free for downloading - listing in zip format, rss feed of latest releases

... and for other books ...

Interesting - the Kamasutra by Vatsyayana is currently the top book today, yesterday, this week, and for the last month.

Alternatives:

Project Gutenberg - 20,000 books free for downloading - listing in zip format, rss feed of latest releases

... and for other books ...

Interesting - the Kamasutra by Vatsyayana is currently the top book today, yesterday, this week, and for the last month.

Alternatives:

Project Gutenberg - 20,000 books free for downloading - listing in zip format, rss feed of latest releases

... and for other books ...

Interesting - the Kamasutra by Vatsyayana is currently the top book today, yesterday, this week, and for the last month.

Well, I'm not sure where you get your definition of communism, but it seems like you've done a bit of study on it. Most of us would probably consider the Communist Manifesto http://www.gutenberg.org/files/61/61.txt to be a reasonable source of information. One of the statements in the introductory section is: "It is high time that Communists should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this nursery tale of the Spectre of Communism with a Manifesto of the party itself."

I'm sure you've probably read it before, but it seems to me that communism explicitly requires the violent overthrow of the bourgeois as it's method of implementation. I don't see how this could be compatible with democracy.

What the hell? A Modest Proposal ?

The idea is not new....

I fail to see the necessity of (and, accordingly, I resent bitterly) all these coral-reef methods. Better walls than this, and better and less life-wasting ways of making them, are surely possible. In the wall in question, concrete would have been cheaper and better than bricks if only "the men" had understood it. But I can dream at last of much more revolutionary affairs, of a thing running to and fro along a temporary rail, that will squeeze out wall as one squeezes paint from a tube, and form its surface with a pat or two as it sets.

H.G. Wells, ANTICIPATIONS OF THE REACTION OF MECHANICAL AND SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS UPON HUMAN LIFE AND THOUGHT (1902 second edition)

Could a World Education Council codevelop an Open Source Education?

Based off of free resources such as Project Gutenberg
and Wikipedia.

A great deal of basic education is 1. Old 2. Redundant
Math, Science, Language, all 'Open Source' to begin with if you think about it.

Only when you get into culture, social studies, politics, religion, do differences among cultures begin to diverge.

How about it ?
A Global Education, not sourced on any one country/politics/belief system,
teaching the needed skills of math, logic, science, reading, speaking.

http://gutenberg.org/
Last modified this month.
I think Project Gutenberg is still around.

I'm a kind of baffled why people are talking about starting up new projects or Open Sourcing (tm) google's prject (whatever that means...).

Project Gutenburg is open and non proprietary (ASCII text) and has been for quite a while.

After scanning, they use a distributed proofreading system where volunteers compare a scanned page image to the OCR text for errors. If you've got some free time, consider helping out.

If Microsoft is so dedicated to online books and thinks it's such a great idea, I wonder why they didn't contribute to an already well-established site, like The Gutenberg Project which got its start back in 1971.

Is this what they call embrace and extend?

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/101

I was just discovering this by reading The Brick Testament, and going back to the actual text on Project Gutenberg. You just pointed me at Evil Bible, which is even better -- I was thinking I'd compile something like that myself.

Mostly just posting this to give evilbible an advantage with search engines (you didn't link to it), but this is interesting. Thanks.

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

The DaVinci code won't help those savages dig themselves out of their own poverty, but books from Mark Twain, Jane Austen, Shakespeare, etc just might... it just might.

Project Gutenberg collects sheet music. Unfortunately they don't have much available yet, and little of it is brass music. The number of renaissance trumpet solo pieces is essentially nil, sorry about that. :-)

I've had some luck hunting MIDI files on the net and cleaning them up for printing in Sibelius or Finale. Unfortunately it requires a lot of work as most songs must be rearranged to suit the ensemble. I've done this mostly on vocal music (renaissance mixed quartet) and classic jazz. The trick is to separate the relevant MIDI tracks, adjust the notes to the nearest 1/8th or 1/16th (most apps have tools for this), extract the melody and chorus parts, and tie them all together in a new file.

--Bud

Part of the problem is that fingerprinting doesn't work when the bots are programmed to create unique messages. When you aren't paying for the CPU time, why send 1,000,000 identical, easily-fingerprintable messages when you can send 1,000,000 unique messages?

And as for natural language parsing, a circa-1986 grammar checker would be fine, except for one thing--lots of spams now just have a paragraph or two from Project Gutenberg texts.

My theory is that the amount of spam will *finally* start to decline over the next 5-8 years as all those unpatched Windows boxes finally start dropping off the Net. XP-SP2 has been pretty good, I assume Vista will be at least as good, and assuming there are no major holes in those--I know there will be some flaws, but not the gaping holes we saw in 98-XP--things will finally start to turn around over the course of the next decade.

Woo hoo! Email will be usable again in 2016! Just like it was in 1996!