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Here's something that somewhat goes along with what he's saying, but it's different in slightly subtle ways.

The sheet music may very well be copyrighted due to small, even minor, variations that the publisher put in it. Not so much the formatting, though I suspect in some more extreme cases (i.e., not just changing the font and page width) that the new work could be copyrighted. So all that needs to happen is that a publisher get a hold of Bach's original work, or at least some old copy of it, change a few notes, and they could then copyright that. That's why organizations like Project Gutenberg are so important.

It sounds like the modern definition (copyright infringement) was added because people used it in that sense. Webster does it sometimes (although some regard Webster to be of lower quality).

No, you're still misunderstanding me. The act of publishing a copy of a text -- the text, not the footnotes or annotations -- places that copy of the text under the copyright of the editor or publisher.

So, for example, the text in your 1998 edition of Shakespeare is under copyright. The words "Oh, that this too, too sullied flesh would melt" as printed in that edition are under copyright.Copyright law prohibits you from reproducing the text of an entire play from that edition. If you're very lucky, the text is identical to the text as printed in a 19th-century edition which is out of copyright; so in that case you may reproduce that version of the text at your whim. -- just so long as it's clear that it's the 19th-century edition that you're reproducing, and not the 1998 edition. One copy of Shakespeare is public domain, the other is copyrighted.

The rationale for why this is so is that every new edition of a text involves creative work. In the case of Shakespeare, that involves things like going through the text and evaluating which readings are preferable to which other readings: e.g. "Oh that this too, too sullied flesh", or "Oh that this too, too solid flesh"? Should the comma be there? Should there be another comma after "Oh"? and so on.

This is just plain wrong. There is no U.S. copyright on Project Gutenberg ebooks. In fact, the Project specifically prohibits copyrighted material.

Again, this is a misunderstanding. Project Gutenberg will not allow you to upload copyrighted works, as that would make them liable for reproducing them unlawfully: that's what the text you quote means. However, once you upload a public-domain work, Project Gutenberg's act of reproducing it places that copy of the text under a copyright owned by Project Gutenberg. It is only on the basis of this that they are able to attach that licence of theirs to the start of each text: you can't licence something you don't own. They don't have an explicit copyright notice in the text, but that's not legally necessary; they do include a general notice in the Project Gutenberg Licence:

1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works.

Books available on Project Gutenberg are certainly under copyright, or there'd be no reason to enforce the use of licences prepended to each book there.

There already is a wiki for James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. It takes advantage of WikiMedia formatting and thus is "wikified." Every two or three words, there's a link to some obscure reference that good ol' Jimbo [Joyce] made, so you can understand the novel, if you really really want to.

There is a drawback to this, though. James Joyce did not intend that the novel be understood. It was meant to model a dream -- albeit a boringly long one -- and if someone wakes you up every two seconds to tell you what something means, it's not as fun. Annotated, it's like reading Nabokov's version of Eugene Onegin, and if given the choice, I would not have that one wikified, with all due respect to that Lolita guy.

While the Wake wiki is good for comprehension and finally understanding what that huge word in the second paragraph was, the addition of technology makes it inferior to the original. Obviously, you can ignore the links, but in several other cases with e-books, reading a book is made more inconvenient by wikifying it. There is no real electronic substitute for "flipping through a book", and the simple format of a single finite page, as opposed to turtles all the way down. (Just check out an e-book: most of the time, the webpages are huge.)

Oh, and Gutenberg? If anything, have Wikipedia partner with them, if the two are not in cahoots already. No use forming a needless schism in the world of free online e-books.

I think that this would be a good target as far as literature is concerned. I know that this costs ~$8k on Amazon so the copyrights are probably worth a lot but I think that a lot of these titles are public domain. If they are, I think it would be worth making a proposition in the millions to Penguin for their editions to be made available on the Wiki. I'm a computer scientist so I don't know how realistic this would be. Of course, they could probably host Project Gutenberg for free if they wanted.

As far as educational works go, I'm all for the textbooks. Grade school & high school, of course. But what I'd really like to see is the "Canonical works" of each field. I'm talking about the standard books that are used to teach each major in the United States. They could do a survey of books and then attempt to contact the authors & publishers to work a deal. Some titles I've seen on everyone's shelves are, of course, the Donald Knuth series and this list has a lot of standards I recognize just by the covers.

The most important thing for them to do would to pay lawyers and literature experts to scan the internet for potential authors willing to put out books for free. I've seen some classic computer science books go up like this and I'm sure that if Wikipedia asked for permission to host, they would be able to with mild restrictions. Like the author having the final say on what is kept and removed from the Wiki page. I mean, look at O'Reilly's OpenBook Project, don't you think they would allow Wikipedia to host that for a tiny one time fee? I'd bet that sales would increase if they even put a link to buy the book. I've heard a lot of authors argue for their books to be put online so that people will feel compelled to buy a hardcopy. Wasn't that the point of Google's textbook preview search?

Other people they could target is an open invitation to any estates that own the rights of long dead authors to have their ancestor's works published. Dr. Suess, anyone? I mean, how do you license a loved one's works and continually soak up money for them? To me, the work of Disney in this respect is just plain rotten and ruined some good guidelines to release works to the public domain.

I don't know, I just think that they should spend money over a period of time searching for permission to host books for free or nearly free. I have hope that this is done very very well and augments the OLPC project nicely.

You should read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair (available here). According to him the D's and the R's were equally into electoral skulduggery; his hero/antihero worked for both parties.

Either we trust the people running our elections or we don't.

Read a book!

</Handy>

Simply amazing concept. I wonder where on Earth this Oliver Curry could have found the idea for such a breakthrough theory.

I certainly hope he got a lot of research grants for this one.

What kind of idiocy is this "genetic theory" from Oliver Curry? Where is the evidence for humans abandoning at least hundreds of generations of "racial" mating exclusion in favor of thousands of generations of "class" inbreeding? Where's the selection criterion forcing that division of mating opportunity by work in much more extreme degree than the millenia-old class system that has failed to produce the results Curry predicts in the future?

Humans have been dependent on "technology" to reproduce for many thousands of generations. Tech is freeing us ever more from any selection criteria except infectious disease (just more unevenly). Current tech trends make genetics ever less important to using tech, which further decouples it from evolutionary mechanics.

Curry just wants smooth-skinned women with big eyes and "pert" breasts, who he thinks will prefer "graceful" nerds like him to the exclusion of the "robust" people who like tech less. So what? So he thinks HG Wells' The Time Machine is a prediction of our future more than a social satire on Wells' Victorian classist society. He should stick to hack SF rehashes, and leave the genetics to people who are realistic enough to actually get laid.

what i think the greatest use for ebooks will be in the nature of school textbooks. load a semester's worth of books into the device. at the end of the semester archive them somewhere for reference and load the next set. e will not totally replace paper but has its place. i recently loaded plucker and zlib into an old palm pilot and downloaded several books from project gutenberg. i find i read as much on this as i do paper. its handy, it keeps track of my page for me, it's searchable. its not perfect (my wish list could get quite large) but its limitations are reasonable.

The Web has certainly replaced magazines for the most part, and is even starting to replace academic journals.

I wouldn't be surprised to hear that textbook sales are decreasing in real terms since the introduction of easily found information suitable for helping out with a lot of university work.

And there are already exact replacements for some book content.

Just look at what porn is doing - are porn mags still used as much as they were? Nope, it's on the 'net. The web is the main component of a book replacement and once you can get paper like displays which don't need any bulky electronics another feature of books will be replicated in modern technology.

Blogs have replaced journals, and TV guides are now transmitted over the air and published on the net too. All paper based content moved to "book" replacements.

Plato's idea of mass censorship and restriction of freedoms was in an IDEAL society. The idea was that there must be great non-elected leaders that truly cared and knew how to provide the best for their people. (By the way, if people are interesting in reading The Republic, you can read it online.)

Do you really think we have leaders that can implement anything even close to that properly? Since we don't have such a government, it's extremely dangerous to give them that kind of power.

I'm not buying a damned, DRMed book, but there's always Project Gutenburg (http://www.gutenberg.org/). I'd actually like a peripheral display using something like e-ink. It would be something I can dump text from the main monitor for long reading (like Slashdot comments) - or documentation...that'd be a relief.

Yes, I see your point. Yet: what are the odds of you chatting with Nelson Mandela (mandela1918@msn.com) compared to reading a good book http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/scores/top? I'll let Mandela chat with other charismatic world-leaders, and join Holmes and Watson in rainy London. Cheers! ;-)

If you read G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy (available at ), one of the characteristics of insanity (and also of conspiracy theory) is that it is typically a logically closed system. That is, the insane man and the conspiracy theorist have not lost their reason.

The flaw is that their closed system is infinitesimal compared to the system that we know to be real. A person might think that all mankind is conspiring to keep him in the dark about the conspiracy. Any denials, rationally enough, can be explained as part of the conspiracy. But the interpretation of the world is just as reasonable, and far more interesting, if every man is actually interested in his own selfish persuits.

The problem with the conspiracy theorist is not lack of reason, but lack of imagination.

But for that reason, this is no death blow to the conspiracy thoerists.

Linus Torvalds started to build a Unix-like kernel "just for fun" and his fun project soon attracted contibutions even though Linus never offered any bounty or payment. So what's the difference between Work and Play? The former often sucks all the fun out of doing things while the latter usually encourages people to contribute simply because it's fun.

Raising funds to employ one or two release managers for a short period of time just before the "etch" release may actually be a very good idea but I hope that the people behind this "Dunc-Tank" idea keep in their mind that fun and play will always be much more powerful motivators than money in a volunteer project like Debian. A crash course into understanding why this should be so can be found in the second chapter of "Adventures of Tom Sawyer" by Mark Twain:

Is there is a gray area in teaching for profit? Look from the point of view of the worker. The professor is being paid to teach by the university, and indirectly, by his students. This work is to teach them classes.

Besides this, he is doing some extra work taping and delivering copies of his teaching for a personal fee. If it's not forbidden by the contract of his other job, and permission is given by the university, he is allow to do it. It is his free time and he is allowed to ask whatever price for it.

But Copyright law has evolved to be the prime concern of profitable companies and has the potential to control everything. It is law that rules on creativeness and humans, being naturally creative, are being wrapped in it unintentionally. It is exactly like "The Trial" by Kafka. We have become so entangled in copyright law, that a Professor asking to be paid to teach, rings like trespassing on our individual rights, because of Copyright Law.

The problem is not that he is being paid for teaching, but if are students allowed to learn. When Professor X publishes his work for profit, it is Copyright Law again falling over our heads, and "danger of being sued" alarms sounding all around. It's psychological. Pure and simple fear.

The question is "what can students do with this material"? How is his work Copyrighted and licensed? Should he sue people that take notes in his class? After this, are his students allowed to learn at all? Should them be Joseph Ks waiting in line for trial?

BTW, Kafka's "The Trial"'s Copyright has expired so you can legally read it. http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7849

Enjoy.

Some of these like The Jungle have always been available on Project Gutenberg. Many of them are also available for free offline at your local public library. Said institutions are often the places that spend the most effort fighting against banned books and doing so on total budgets smaller than Google's petty cash.

That's not to knowck what Google is doing. They are doing a good service here but let's not neglect the people who fight the fight every day of the week not just once a year.

Some of these like The Jungle have always been available on Project Gutenberg. Many of them are also available for free offline at your local public library. Said institutions are often the places that spend the most effort fighting against banned books and doing so on total budgets smaller than Google's petty cash.

That's not to knowck what Google is doing. They are doing a good service here but let's not neglect the people who fight the fight every day of the week not just once a year.

You're right. They're not publishing these, just making the searchable by all ... er most (pending China's great firewall).

A lot of these I have seen on Project Gutenberg.

Sometimes when I'm dying in my cubicle at work, I open up a random page of James Joyce's Ulysses and drift away ... I was hoping Google would provide the original typesetting (that Joyce was very particular about) but instead it seems I just get a preview :-(

You're right. They're not publishing these, just making the searchable by all ... er most (pending China's great firewall).

A lot of these I have seen on Project Gutenberg.

Sometimes when I'm dying in my cubicle at work, I open up a random page of James Joyce's Ulysses and drift away ... I was hoping Google would provide the original typesetting (that Joyce was very particular about) but instead it seems I just get a preview :-(

Please read H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine".

I mean the book. Not the movie.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/35/35.txt

Read it all the way through. It is alarmingly relevant to this particular discussion.

I am not vision impared, but I have also run across several other sites with thousands of free online classic stories. They were most likely not set up specifically for vision impared people. These are the websites that I have run across:

• Project Gutenberg
• Arthurs Classic Novels
• University of Virginia Library's Etext Center
• Baen Free Library
• Planet PDF Free PDF eBooks Archive

You mean like downloading a book from Project Gutenberg?

And Google Book Search has free downloads as well. Read the blog entry about it.

Gutenberg already uses OCR. Has for a decade at least.

Indeed it has. And as their scanning FAQ explains, they recommend you buy an OCR software package. I'm all for having the right tools for the job, even if it means going non-OSS, but if these packages are available for free, it encourages more people to participate. Surely that's a good thing?

How about Project Gutenberg?

Over the years, Project Gutenberg will become insignificant. High school literature teachers already require students to read specific books that are copyrighted and aren't provided as part of the school's textbook rental program. For instance, a lot of curricula require the student to read the copyrighted novel The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald. As the mainstream media recognize more recent novels as "classics of twentieth century literature", this situation will expand; students will be expected to read more post-1923 books in addition to pre-1923 books.

How about just leveraging the vast store of knowledge that others, more dedicated than you, have made available, for free, without DRM, online, as it currently exists?

So do you believe that, say, a music appreciation course should stop abruptly at 1922, where the Mutopia and Gutenberg Music stop due to copyright term extension?

"DRM really hampers the flow of information in education."

OK, I swore to stop responding to "Your Rights Online" articles, mostly because they really don't have anything to do with my rights online... but THIS is just stupid... and unsupported.

HOW, exactly, does DRM hamper the flow of information in education? The parent posts not ONE instance where the bald assertion made is true... yet gets moderated up.

Let's consider higher education, first: If a particular college/university's policies permit it, then, a professor is free to release their lectures, as he or she wishes... and in fact, some institutions release their curriculum, in part, or in whole, for free. MIT comes to mind: http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

They've chosen to make those resources freely available, without DRM... clearly, DRM hasn't hampered the flow of information in education in this case.

Do you dispute this?

"It's important to remember that the "traditional" classroom is changing. We now have things like "distance learning.""

No offense, but, the wealth of knowledge available now, without DRM, so far outweighs your non-examples, to render your post ludicrous... and, "distance learning" is only a login to the 'net away, for anyone that wishes to learn...

How about Project Gutenberg? http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page

You mean to tell me, that free, non-DRM access to some of the best written knowledge, insights, entertainment, created by the best of us, over thousands of years, means nothing?

And, it will only get better, over time.

So, how does DRM hamper that "flow of information", please?

"It's important to think about innovative current or future uses instead of dwelling on ancient historical uses of computers in education."

How about just leveraging the vast store of knowledge that others, more dedicated than you, have made available, for free, without DRM, online, as it currently exists?

"(BTW, let's be grownups and stop with the personal attacks, M-Kay?)"
I've refrained from such, but I admit I was tempted :)

I'm sorry, but, there's *so* much available now, that I at times resent the fact that my time is so limited - I have to work for a living - that cuts into the time I can spend reading, and learning.

Regards,

dj

Unless they're vaccinated, don't give them MUMPS; if you do find a nice Doctor (Like Dr. Pascal), 'cuz Pascal was fun for me in College.

If they like noises, Squeak is good, but the cogently verbiaged might prefer SmallTalk in a group. For those speech impaired, knowing there's other people who Lisp would be good.

The mean ones will abuse Snobol in Winter

The A.D.D. kids will probably like the feeling of Euphoria they get from their first

Of course, you could teach them a very nice language with a horrible name, Brainfuck.

Or, you could just look Here for a comparison of popular programming languages.

• Google
• Wikipedia
• Internet Archive
• Free Books (Project Gutenberg)

Pareto, Durkheim, Kropotkin, Simmel, Tonnies, Adam Smith, Hobbes, Jesus, Confucius, Democracy, Golden Rule. And bees.

First, it's Project Gutenberg, not "the Gutenberg Project". If you're gonna lecture for karma then at least get the name right.

Second, it's not always Gutenberg texts. I've seen segments of texts from other copyright-free texts too (including some Russian books translated to English), and even copyrighted ones like Stephen King's Misery -- I guess when someone's already engaged in the utterly selfish and inconsiderate act of spamming, copyright violation is just icing on the cake. The Annie Wilkes treatment is just too good for some of these chaps.

Steve will save the Big Song and Dance Routine for the Suits and BlogBoys at the next big release of OS X. If he is going for a 1-2 knock-out - Steve will have the New iPod and OS X release at the same event, along with 'one more thing...' that we haven't even got through rumors...

OS X new voices - Thank God! Real Human Voices and Speed Voices - Finally, that 1980s voice can be saved for F/X - when you want to build MP3 files of http://www.gutenberg.org/ books, you won't have to buy extra software. AT&T Natural Voices are what I use all the time on Windows PCs, it will be nice to have most of that functionality built into OS X.
Thank You Apple!

Time Machine - another Thank Steve! Having to subscribe to .Mac to get your backup files to restore is annoying, now Time Machine will do backups better, and all you need is an external hard drive. Amazing interface...

I am looking forward to the Top Secret new features he wouldn't even mention at the developers conference - hopefully built-in DVR ability so a Mac can plug right into your cable box and save all your favorite shows, so you can watch them later on your iPod...

The new systems are very impressive.

All we can wish for anyone is Good Health.
Good Health to Steve Jobs, Long Life to Him.
Taking pot-shots at his looks is 'below the belt,'
I wouldn't expect such personal remarks from professional writers.
Give the guy a break, he does more in one month than most people do in a lifetime.

Good Job Apple, Good Job Steve Jobs!

I have been fighting these for a few months now as they tried to use a web form I managed to spread. I ended up with lots of entries like this in the "Sender" box:

\n
Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=8543732eef2ac361a5574297208e707c
MIME-Ve rsion: 1.0
Subject: ne chair was empty, but it was soon occupied a
bcc: XXXXX@XXXXXX [removed out of kindness]

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

--8543732eef2ac361a5574297208e707c
Con tent-Type: text/plain; charset=\"us-ascii\"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

has made a proselyte after all, you are half a atholic hat am not answered tto, and that
--8543732eef2ac361a5574297208e707c--

.

What's MORE interesting is that each quote had been slightly modified.

Here is the exact text used above as pulled from the original text.. note that in the form submission, certain letters have been omitted/changed:

"These she also receives!" returned Wilhelm; and striking him upon
the shoulder he added, with a smile, "you are, according to the
Roman Catholic manner, near exalting the mother above the Son! Old
Rosalie has made a proselyte; after all, you are half a Catholic!"

"That am I not!" answered Otto, "and that will I not be!"

However, it may just be that they have crappy software that removes capital letters and semicolons (although it isn't always that predictable). But why remove letters if you're aiming to fool Bayes filters into thinking this is real English?

Do others have the same omissions? I've thought these were weird since I first saw them.

-Bill

In related news, the Bloomsday Book is also online, and can be found here....

There's a crazy guy in my old hometown who leaps up and down in the city centre screaming "I'm invisible!". Of course, everyone completely ignores him, which fuels his fantasy that he really is...

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5230/5230.txt

I think we should pursue H.G. Wells' theory:

"You make the glass invisible by putting it into a liquid of nearly
the same refractive index; a transparent thing becomes invisible if
it is put in any medium of almost the same refractive index. And if
you will consider only a second, you will see also that the powder
of glass might be made to vanish in air, if its refractive index
could be made the same as that of air; for then there would be no
refraction or reflection as the light passed from glass to air."

"...the whole fabric of a man except the red of his blood and the black
pigment of hair, are all made up of transparent, colourless tissue.
So little suffices to make us visible one to the other. For the
most part the fibres of a living creature are no more opaque than
water."

And it's free.
Kill the waaabit
Kill the waaabit...

It would seem that the primary function of a womb is to incubate children. There is no organ in the body that has organ donation as it's primary function, therefore, it is reasonable for people to be able to use their organs for their primary function, and not reasonable to require them to donate them. As organ donation is not legally required even after death (at least in Australia, I assume this is the case in the US) this is in line with current law. I think that trying to compare using a body organ for it's usual function for 9 months to having an organ permanently removed is not helpful.

So I'm saying the normal and expected use of body parts is not to donate them but to have them function in your body. If the use of the womb for the incubation of the child was required (normal use), it would not imply a requirement to donate body parts (contrary to normal use). It is not a comment dependent on creationism or any other religious belief. In any case, I just did "grep -c purpose otoos610.txt" on Charles Darwins "The Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection, 6th Edition" from Project Gutenburg. The word purpose is in there 75 times. I haven't checked context, but I suspect that it's still ok to use the word purpose even if you're not a creationist. Your "Therefore" needs new thinking.

And abortion is currently legal, so that's in line with current law.

I don't dispute this. I just think it shouldn't be for the mojority of cases. It doesn't change my point that there is legal precedent to say that organ donation is not compulsory.

Certainly it has been suggested - it's a well known thought experiment to get people to think about the ethics of abortion.

I meant suggested as in suggesting that somebody in particular should do this, or that it should become common practise or the like. Not suggested as in making a philosophical point about it with no intention of bringing it to pass. No matter.

Yes, it's hypothetical, obviously, and no it isn't necessary for thought experiments to be possible - that's the whole point of them. So, I'm still curious, would you say that a mother is obliged to give treatment? If not, why does her legal responsibility no longer apply?

OK then, to satisfy your curiosity: If a child (i.e., not a fetus, but after birth) developed a condition which required the mother to be hooked up to some life support for 9 months, I don't think everyone would agree that as part of her legal responsibility, she is bound by the law to do so. ... no I don't think she should be held legally responsible to do this. There are at least two reasons. First is same as the organ donation case, it is not part of normal function, unlike pregnancy. The second is that it's not currently possible, and people should not be legally required to do the impossible. It is worth noting that unlike the case of a child falling sick, by far the majority of pregnancies are a result of consensual sex. The woman is usually pregnant as a result of actions she chose to take (even if she did not intend to get pregnant, and yes, I think the father ought to be taking responsibility also, although he cannot bear the child, b

Your point is taken; to be clear, I should have said 'web' rather than 'Internet'. That shows you I've been hanging around my students too long.

I disagree with your other assertion, however. I suspect that reading all of the text on the Internet would take much longer than similarly consuming the binary content, even if you were to factor in how much more quickly we can read.

Project Gutenberg alone contains 18,000 books. If we assume that each book contains just the equivalent of 150 "pages", that's 2.7 million pages. Now, you may read faster than I do, but it takes me about an hour to read fifty pages in your average novel. So, finishing off just the text available at that single site would take me 54,000 hours (non-stop for over six years).

YouTube, on the other hand, boasts "millions" of streaming movies. If we give a generous estimate of four minutes per clip, then watching two million videos would take me over 130,000 hours, or nearly twice as long.

Now, how many other sites like YouTube are there out there, with original content not duplicated by YouTube? MySpace? A dozen more?

On the other hand, how many large primarily-text sites are there with original content? The Wikipedia, usenet archives on Google, everything2, IMDb, Slashdot, thousands of bloggers, hundreds of newspapers and magazines, etc.

My blog alone would take require more than 500 pages if you were keen to print it out.

I believe that even if you added in the time to look at every image on Flickr for 20 seconds, listen to every song available on iTunes, and watch every movie (including porn) ever sold in DVD form (and thus available on some irc channel somewhere), that reading all the text on the Internet would still take longer by a factor of ten.

Anyone want to try to make a more accurate estimate?

In the crazy world we now inhabit, expect to see a lawsuit against the critics for restraint of trade.

Old news.

Oprah vs. Beef Industry

Relevent links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oprah_Winfrey_Sho w

Scroll down to 'Tuesdays With Dr Phil'

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859 -1&q=oprah+beef

Assorted related links via Google

Be thankfull meat processing isn't as bad now as it was in THE JUNGLE

'Uncut original' pay version on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1884365302/103-59 32692-9835849?v=glance&n=283155

Shouldn't this version be PD as well?

Anyone interested in just posting the 'uncut' portions somewhere so people can add it to their Project Gutenberg copies? If PG did it, they'd get into trouble for sure!

Slashdot CAPTCHA: calumny (old way to say 'defamation') coincidence?

And now for a lesson: referring to Wikipedia to settle issues of common misconception is an exercise in folly. When debating popular error, do not refer to the populace.

There was a scientific consensus that Black people were inferior to White people. There was a scientific consensus that Iraq had WMDs.

I think we're working off a different definition of "science" here.

Whites and blacks may multiply together, but their offspring is never either white or black; it is always mulatto. It is a half-breed, and shares all the peculiarities of half-breeds, among whose most important characteristics is their sterility, or at least their reduced fecundity. This shows the connection to be contrary to the normal state of the races, as it is contrary to the preservation of species in the animal kingdom. . .Far from presenting to me a natural solution of our difficulties, the idea of amalgamation is most repugnant to my feelings. It is now the foundation of some of the most ill-advised schemes. But wherever it is practiced, amalgamation among different races produces shades of population, the social position of which can never be regular and settled. From a physiological point of view, it is sound policy to put every possible obstacle to the crossing of the races, and the increase of half-breeds. It is unnatural, as shown by their very constitution, their sickly physique, and their impaired fecundity. It is immoral and destructive of social equality as it creates unnatural relations and multiplies the differences among members of the same community in a wrong direction.

No really. Exploitation and dehumanization are at the very core of what Marxism is about

All you have to do is say it once more, and you'll prove it! You may think that's its effect, but it is entirely the opposite of what it's about under any reasonable definition of about.

"Right. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of forked Robert Jordan novels. shudder"

Well, imagine a Beowulf cluster of Beowulfs.

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/981

all the best,

drew

Wow, are you dumb. Go read The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Try chapter 9, at around halfway through.

WTF?
http://www.gutenberg.org/
http://www.fictionbook.ru/

Gutenberg's only got about 150GB of text.

In fact, it was Inspector Gregory with whom Holmes has this dialogue.

Check out Silver Blaze at http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/834

Seriously.

Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

It's easy for you to bitch and moan and fear-monger about the ethics of human DNA in some rice, from your computer chair in your air-conditioned first-world home or office. Meanwhile there are people - real, live people - people with thoughts, and feelings, and whose well-being you'd place at first-priority, whose well-being would be your tantamount concern, whose well-being would trump these silly goddamn over-analytical beardo quack ideas and "what ifs" -- that is, if you weren't such a fucking unthinking monster -- and these people are shitting themselves to death. And even though you and I both laughed as kids when we played Oregon Trail and learned what "dysentary" meant, one of us has managed to grow up, and figures it'd be best if we could put a stop to this horrible pain and suffering in the real world. Meanwhile, the other one is playing Armchair Philosopher, talking about lines being crossed and the ethics of eliminating suffering , without knowing the first thing about what he's talking about. Jesus Christ.

Have you heard about a little invention from the very late 1700s called "vaccinations"? Is this "ethical" in your eyes? Was it "ethical" for Louis Pasteur to inject human beings with (residual amounts of) COW DNA? Or should we have put a stop to this and let smallpox continue to ravage the globe? What about blood transfusions? That's OMG human DNA as well. Or, wait, are you one of those fucking quacker-flappers, like that lady who made an entire campaign out of "HIV does not cause AIDS", then gave AIDS to her daughter (by not taking any preventative measures during pregnancy)?

Look. I'm trying not to be too much of a -1 Flamebait -1 Troll -1 Confrontational Asshole, but what is your deal? If someone you loved (assuming you are actually capable of feeling empathy, or anything beyond Moral Sense [c.f. Twain, "The Mysterious Stranger"]) was locked in a room, in a hotel you did not own, which was currently on fire, would you worry about the ethics of breaking the door down? Would you tap the fireman on the back as he was about to take an axe to the door, and oh-so-wisely, intellectually bleat^H^H^H^H^H state that it was a violation of ethics to be destroying property that wasn't yours? Would you then put on your Humble Pious Face, with your head solemnly cast down, and proclaim your grief for the impending loss of your wife / child / mother / father? Or does this garbage only spew forth from your mouth when it's other people's children whose lives are at risk?

So much idiotic diarrhea dribbling out of your mouth - I'm sure this isn't the only completely moronic thing you've managed to come up with in your blessedly short existance. Maybe you could use a DNA injection. I know I'd gladly sodomize you. I mean "innoculate" you - I get those two words confused =)!



MODS: -1, Whatever me all you want. I prefer not to intellectualize idiocy (such as the Parent post), so if you're going to mod me down for calling bullshit when I see it, mod me down, for calling bullshit, when, I, see... it. </Shatner>

Reading Leo Tolstoy's "The Kingdom of God Is Within You" hasn't helped the apathy at all (not bible banging, but Ghandi and King carried it with them when doing their thing). The book, which I highly recommend, basically shows how all governments are illegitimate.