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In three years there hasn't been one single download of any of these books.

There is one! I even heard it was originally built by hand...on PAPER!

The Special Theory of Relativity got a 91.9% chance of being authentic. I'm sure if Einstein were alive, he'd be relieved.

The last time the old promo.net site was updated was in May of 2003.

The current home of Project Gutenberg is http://www.gutenberg.org/

I direct you to http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1122. Hamlet there. Geeks here.

Ham. Seems, madam, Nay, it is. I know not 'seems.'
        'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
        Nor customary suits of solemn black,
        Nor windy suspiration of forc'd breath,
        No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
        Nor the dejected havior of the visage,
        Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
        'That can denote me truly. These indeed seem,
        For they are actions that a man might play;
        But I have that within which passeth show-
        These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

I have no problem with purchasing ebooks, and do this all the time from either Fictionwise or eReader to read on my Palm Zire (yes, the older one), which I upgraded to 8 MB. And I use to read many hours on it without any problem.

Before I began reading ebooks I did some research and found eReader's DRM scheme to be very nice, unlike others. The ebook comes encrypted with your name and the number of the credit card you used to purchase it as the decryption key. In other words, the ebook isn't device-locked, so I can open it in any Windows, Mac, Palm, Pocket PC and/or Symbian machine (no Linux version so far) I have access to. Also, the standard versions of the reader software are freeware, and the purchaseable Pro ones also aren't device-locked, so I install and reinstall them anywhere. Thus, so far I've purchase both Windows and Palm eReader Pro. And the Fictionwise store has the advantage of also having DRM-free copyrighted ebooks. These don't come nicely formatted as the DRM'ed ones, but they are as readable as any Project Gutenberg text file, so no big deal there.

However, the main advantage I see on ebooks is that they're much cheaper to purchase than printed versions, at least for me who don't live in USA. The shipping charges practiced on online stores such as Amazon or Barnes & Noble to send printed books to Brazil are outrageous, while on ebooks they're $0.

All in all, my ebook reading experience, with both DRM'ed, DRM-free copyrighted and public domain ebooks, has been almost excelent. I've around 200 ebooks and will keep purchasing them no matter what. :)

Now, I bought the Zire for other reasons, and not primarily as a reader. And I don't sit down and read things on it at home. But I've loaded a bunch of things on it (Mark Twain short stories, Machievelli, Plato) which is great if I find myself stuck somewhere with time to kill. It's great for business travel and waiting in long lines.

So it hasn't replaced my regular reading, but certainly has found a place in my reading habits.

I am reading ebooks right now.

Having said that, there are a few reasons why I am reading ebooks, and there are still plenty of things I would like to see improved.

First of all, I use my Palm to read the classics with. The advantage isn't even so much that of price, but of availability. Project Gutenberg has scanned pretty much all of the classics in the English language. (And where it hasn't, that's your fault for not warning us.)

Ah, there's the second reason: I am a Distributed Proofreaders volunteer, and my Palm helps me read the books I helped produce. For instance, currently I am reading H.G. Wells' Certain Personal Matters (not published since 1901, and a lovely collection of satirical essays!).

As for the things that need improving: devices. I am someone who carries books with him, and so I have this wishlist that devices currently do not live up to. Weight, price, size, power consumption, ports, software, none of the devices currently available get all of these right.

And of course it speaks for itself that I own the device, not the publishers. That is why I will never buy Sony.

Q: eBooks - What's Holding You Back?

Seriously, though, I use eBooks all the time; I just get them from here or anywhere else that doesn't try to limit what I can do with them in any way whatsoever. It's my hardware, I'll do whatever I please with it, and that includes copying your copyrighted material; if you don't like that, tough: you shouldn't have released it. I'll pay you if I think it's worth it. If you don't like that either, you should have asked for money up front.

I am not willing to pay a hardback book price for an ebook. If an ebook were 1/4 the price of a hardback book (or paperback book if the book is in paperback), I would consider it. And I am not willing to try to use an ebook in some closed or proprietary format that I won't be able to use in a few years when formats and technologies change.

I have been reading free ebooks from memoware.com on my Palm IIIxe (using the free and simple text reader CSpotRun) for years. Most of these books are from Project Gutenberg, so they are from before 1925, but there are a lot of good stories that are still interesting and/or relevant now. Reading a book on a Palm Pilot is not completely practical, but I have read "War and Peace" that way and it's manageable.

I read lots of ebooks on my Palm Tungsten W. At the moment I'm re-reading the complete works of E. A. Poe (first time I read I's too young to perceive all the nuances).

Now, most of my ebooks come from Memoware, a site dedicated to free ebooks (and they have an extensive list of titles).

Plus, they have a store as well, where you can buy titles that are not public domain yet.

I also download free ebooks from the Project Gutenberg from Many Books, a site that converts plain text files from PG to a range of PDA readers' formats.

Let me wander completely off topic for a second to do two things, 1 point out that most of HG Wells work is available through project Gutenberg, and recommend that anyone who likes Wells download and read The War in the Air by H. G. Wells which you can find here

Movie Ticket X2: $18.50

Popcorn X2: $15.00

Drink X2: $8.00

Used paperback copy of Fellowship of the Ring: $1.00

Proving to your teenage son that there WAS a character in LOTR called Tom Bombadil: Priceless

http://www.gutenberg.org/ Read to yourself and others.

'Girl number twenty,' said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of knowledge.

Sissy blushed, and stood up.

'So you would carpet your room - or your husband's room, if you were a grown woman, and had a husband - with representations of flowers, would you?' said the gentleman. 'Why would you?'

'If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,' returned the girl.

'And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have people walking over them with heavy boots?'

'It wouldn't hurt them, sir. They wouldn't crush and wither, if you please, sir. They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and pleasant, and I would fancy - '

'Ay, ay, ay! But you mustn't fancy,' cried the gentleman, quite elated by coming so happily to his point. 'That's it! You are never to fancy.'

'You are not, Cecilia Jupe,' Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, 'to do anything of that kind.'

'Fact, fact, fact!' said the gentleman. And 'Fact, fact, fact!' repeated Thomas Gradgrind.

'You are to be in all things regulated and governed,' said the gentleman, 'by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether. You have nothing to do with it. You are not to have, in any object of use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact. You don't walk upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don't find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery. You never meet with quadrupeds going up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls. You must use,' said the gentleman, 'for all these purposes, combinations and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are susceptible of proof and demonstration. This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste.'

-- Hard Times

If it makes you feel better you can, but it's just as easy to try reading a book.

If you can't be arsed to get up from you PC then you can pop along to
Project Gutenberg

Well, you're not quite completely free. And in the case you describe, since Fargo is still under copyright, you'd be giving your lawyer an uphill battle.

Now, if you want to start from a work no longer under copyright, and use that to base your movie on, your lawyer will have to put in a lot fewer billable hours. What he invoices may be another story, but that's between him, the FBI, and Grisham's copyright lawyer.

Frankly, I think White Wolf's case over Underworld was roughly the same caliber as this one for the DaVinci code, and WW were not-quite laughed out of court by the judge.

Back a few years I read a great book - Creierul, O enigma descifrata, translated from Romanian, it means "The brain - a deciphered enigma". The author named the concept "MDT: Modeling Device Theory"; the brain is treated as a device that is designed to make predictions about the real world, based on the input from the organs and the experience of the person (which is structured in models).


The book is fantastic, the author proposes an abstract model that explains how the brain works at the software level. The model is able to explain many things, including God [why we need such an entity, and what its actual role is], and love.

The idea is that the brain operates with models, which are meant to make predictions of the future, ones that are as accurate as possible. If a prediction is incorrect, the model is updated, hence the future predictions [based on that model] will be closer to the real deal. There are different models, such as school, internet, apple, etc. The models are inter-connected [think of a graph with a helluvalot of nodes]. The model "school" can be connected with the model "internet", which in its turn is connected with the model "slashdot", and so on.

Love is one of such models, what makes it different is the number of other nodes it has connections with.

Back to school and internet and slashdot: I have internet access at school, and that's where I read slashdot. If you take the school-model out, it's not a big deal; I can use another one, for instance "internet-cafe", and substitute the "dead" one with it.

That's not the case of love - take the dear person away, and the model-structure might collapse, because the absent model cannot be substituted.

This was a very generalized description. The idea is that love is just a software-level dependence: many other models point to it, and if love disappears, whatever you try to do - you get something like a null-pointer assignment.

If you understand Romanian - this book is definitely worth it!

Study the content (Science) of those cartoons (fiction):

#1: Many cartoons were created before, many insulting more than Mohammad, and none rioted in such a way.
#2: In dirt-poor towns, within a day of the un-affirmed and what appears to be an organized complaint, there are pristine replica flags burned; in an actual protest, flags are hand-made, whereas the flags that appeared within 24 hours were all the same dimensions and quality! That's not a protest, that's a pre-meditated effect of some kind and the protest to the mis-alligned artisanry is a lie.
#3: In Islam, as well as Christianity, it is misplaced to define a woman; God made man male and female, whereas a woman is declared by man because they Bear a child. Think of it this way: God assembled a package and recorded a message in that package; the package is delivered either male or female: postcards or postcards covered by an envelope: seed on the outside or seed on the inside. There is no such capacity as an "extremist Muslim" because one is either muslim or not(!) muslim. The scope of Islam has been swayed by the teachings of CIA-trained people founded and known as "Al-quaeda". Al-quaeda has no fidelity-oath to the Lord, therefore they are not muslim and are all liars.
#3: This word that you implicitly construe, "Liberal", is of incomplete and uncoordinated content. There is a corporation known as "Liberal Party", there is an certification or Article assigning or appointing a Liberal, but the manner you have used it is without base. Thomas Jefferson was known to be liberal, not by any manner as a Liberal that you have conveyed; and when he was elected as president to the United States he actually ordered a man to be severely punnished for not removing a hat upon the president appearing and given respect. If recourse to the use of art to insult the character of someone unable to respond (because they are dead in the flesh) is same basis as Thomas Jefferson returning ordinance for similar respects; the Constitution evinces this behaviour as that subject manner to Libel and Slander. Thomas Jefferson, as his previous countrymen, were duelists when settling their disputes on defamation of character: consider The Code of Honor, Or, Rules for the Government of Principals and Seconds in Dueling. Dafamation of character; do you want to put a value on someone's head (of state) that has been properly appraised of its value? Mohammad was known to have beheaded many heads, and the spirit of these events is true that even electing a president is the same likeness of decapitating one's mind and moving their body to the control of another: governors, presidents, etc.
#4: Muslims know they can set fire to their own property, and no good will come of setting fire to another's property. Were these muslims tresspassing on their Holy Scriptures and following the leadership and commands of others? The CIA has been running their psy-ops teams throughout the world looking for gullible and good-mannered people to lie and misplace their God-given reasoning to tresspass upon the Holy Scriptures.

Remember this: God is good, God is love, God is truth. Prove all things, whether they are of God or man.

God bless you.

The interested reader can look up the passages cited here in the Project Gutenberg triple-translation of the Koran. But unless I am very much mistaken, the "idolators" that the Prophet is railing about are not Jews and Christian, who are of course the ones who do have monotheistic faiths, but the polytheistic communities of Arabia which were his contemporaries. Note the numerous citations of "Moses" and "Jesus" in that work, in by no means critical terms.

What a study of the Koran does not reveal however is everything which has happened since that time, including the fatwas issued by religious authorities, such as the this one prohibiting making images of people and animals. I think one has to understand this side of the religion as well as the Koranic side in order to form a complete opinion.

But you are right that corrupt politicians are ancient history. The real problem is that they are current history as well ;)

It's a matter of structure. Japanese lends itself to derive more words for their syllabic structure and use of chinese ideograms. I use a pocket dictionary with over 60000 entries, and it's still not enough for even reading newspapers. You have to guess many words.

In the English language most of the ethimology is obscured thus making more difficult for the speaker to learn each word. There's also a multiplicity of roots meaning the exact same thing, even for basic concepts. This patching of the language doesn't make the language richer, but quite the opposite. The japanese use a lot more words than us westerners, especially in written media. Any bilingual speaker with an education knows that.

Japanese (and also Chinese) have a steep learning curve because of their writing systems, but once you get past a point, you just memorize new words more effectively since they're combinations of units with a known meaning. Us westerners don't know the roots of our words for the most part, which is mostly because of the extensive borrowing you mention, which I might add is common to every other european language I know of. They've also borrowed happily, and where they didn't, they're just borrowing back from English now (actually for things they don't even lack, too - pisses me off sometimes).

The typical American college student knows between 20000 and 30000 words on graduation. With 1000 words you cover >99% of the English spoken in the streets. I'd say you need a lot less than that. An average high-school japanese student knows more than 20000 words, if only because for the characters they're forced to memorize to get through high-school.

English may have many words on paper. Other european languages have officially less words than English just because they take out of the dictionary more easily. Some claim English has over half a million non-technical words, which is utter bullshit. They must have been adding in the words in Beowulf. I'd bet there are no more than 100000 non-slang words in all English modern literature put together. I even have a half-finished perl script somewhere just stripping words out of text and deconjugating verbs and taking out proper nouns just to check how many English words do people actually use. I have to retake it some day.

A language doesn't have as many words as it's most stupidly big dictionary, but rather as many as a significant portion of their speakers get to know. I'm afraid American English - the most influential dialect of English - is very poor. But it's not only that; the structure of the language is such that we have more grammar and they have more words to express the same things. The opposite happens when comparing with French for instance; I believe they have less words but way more grammar. Human communication is not more or less complex in other cultures. If they lack something, they compensate with something else.

Now that was a waste of my time... who's going to read all that? :D

I take it you haven't actually owned or used a PSP for watching movies as these times are terribly inaccurate. The PSP will last 3 hours, maybe, while regularly reading from the UMD media. On the other hand, if you are referring to watching movies off of a memory stick then, fine, 8 hours is feasible (though, as a PSP owner, I've never had the PSP last 8 hours doing ANYTHING, let alone watching video or playing games).

Given that you are referring to memory stick videos, and you want to watch a full length movie on one, let's look at what that entails:

- Let's ignore the fact that it takes a long time to convert a movie to the proper format for memory stick.

- Let's ignore that you can't fit more than one, maybe 2 movies at a lower quality rating, on a 1gb memory stick (definitely nowhere near the quality of even UMD, let alone DVD).

- Let's ignore that most consumers will pay full MSRP for a 1gb memory stick duo, which is the only hope of having 2 movies (at low framerate and quality) on the same stick. That full price, btw, is $99. On pricewatch I found one for $74. Best price I can find for 2gb is $146.67 (pricewatch)

- Let's also ignore that some *cough*evil*cough* organizations feel it is illegal for us to rip a movie for any purpose.

Ok now that we've ignored most all of the pertinent facts, we conclude that it's great to get to watch movies for 8 hours straight, assuming you like watching at 8-10fps, 320x200 resolution, with lots of encoding artifacts. You also don't mind shelling out $250 for the base device with a 4" screen, another $74 per 2 movies ($150 to maximize your 8 hours on average), or spending a weekend converting the movies you're completely certain you will want to watch the next time you're out and about.

Yeah, that's a good deal!

By all means, the PSP is a cool little device, it's just severely lacking in a few aspects that would help make it THE device to have. My examples would be the poor *REAL* battery life, the inability to do say, listen to music while browsing or looking at text files http://gutenberg.org/, or a useful amount of storage http://store.palm.com/product/index.jsp?productId= 1999092&cp=1157580

Of course, this is all opinion, blending with facts and personal experience. No need to get upset if you disagree.

p.s. Yes, I do feel like I got majorly jilted when I bought my PSP. Almost a year later, my psp has no new games that interest me, no value in the videos (cripes, at least make them half the price of a dvd since they have half the quality and none of the features!), and my DS has brought me many hours of quality unique entertainment... I should sell the PSP.

In "When the Sleeper Wakes," a guy is in a coma for a thousand years, wakes up and his money has taken over the world. Highly recommend it, but that's because I like Wells a lot.

This whole rootkit thing surely plays a role in my deciding not to buy this thing, but I never liked Sony's products actually. This thing too has a memory stick, which makes it more expensive than necessary. I really want a device like this but I want to be able to choose the manufacturer of the memory, and I want to be able to upload any .pdf file to it without having to convert it first. O, and I also want to be able to read ASCII text files on it, because I'd like to use it to read the books you can download from the Gutenberg project.

I want one too, but only if it can read HTML.

If it can't access Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ or the Baen free library (and subscriptions) http://www.baen.com/library/, well, what use is it?

But wouldn't RSS imply the ability to display HTML as well?

• Here
• Here
• Here
• And Here

Hard disks may be physically larger and slower for random access, but they are faster than Flash for large sequential reads, much in the same way that the hare is faster than the turtle in that old fable.

As I'm sure you know, the turtle was faster:

"A HARE one day ridiculed the short feet and slow pace of the Tortoise, who replied, laughing: "Though you be swift as the wind, I will beat you in a race." The Hare, believing her assertion to be simply impossible, assented to the proposal; and they agreed that the Fox should choose the course and fix the goal. On the day appointed for the race the two started together. The Tortoise never for a moment stopped, but went on with a slow but steady pace straight to the end of the course. The Hare, lying down by the wayside, fell fast asleep. At last waking up, and moving as fast as he could, he saw the Tortoise had reached the goal, and was comfortably dozing after her fatigue.

"Slow but steady wins the race."

Not all e-books are DRM'd up the wazoo, manybooks.net has 12,537 free un-DRM'd texts available in a variety of formats for each text. They are produced by Project Gutenberg and if you like you can help out too !

I have a palm tungsten C which has ended up being used mainly as an e-reader. I currently have around 70 full length books on it, and one of the best aspects of it is, if I get bored of one book and feel like a change, when I go back to the same book later on, it's still at the same page (dead handy for tomes like War and Peace !). Add to that the inline dictionary, bookmarks and notepad and it's a cool tool.

I have had to play with the background and font colours a bit to get it just right for my eyes, but now I can read comfortably at the same distance as I would a normal book, either while in the dark in bed, or in daylight.

Also, as the Tungsten C is wireless, I can dload the ebooks to my home server, and if I need to add a new selection to the palm, I just dload it over the LAN, and it goes right into the library. No need to fire up the crappy "Documents To Go" software on my XP laptop anymore.

Battery life is fine. I can read a whole book with only one recharge, as long as I turn off the wifi.

I have yet to see any real life "e-paper" and so I'll reserve judgement, but it can't be much easier to use than my tungsten c.

Not all ebooks have DRM. Someone else already mentioned Baen Publishing's Free Library. Great source of science fiction and fantasy. There's always Project Gutenberg, the http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/>University of Pennsylvania's Online Books Page, and just about anything with a Creative Commons License.

Granted, that doesn't cover all subjects. Nor is there much out there that is current. However, I think that you'll find that at least a few smaller publishers are following Baen's lead and opening up their back catalogs. It's a great way for authors to get exposure, after all.

They tried before with the Librie, it failed because of DRM and high price in my opinion. Wake me when a light waterproof unit appears, that can read freely avaiable content from Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/. If the price is below 200$ it WILL stand a fair chance replacing a pocketbook for me.

non-DRM e-books do exist

"There are 17,000 free books in the Project Gutenberg Online Book Catalog." - Project Gutenberg

I would very much like to have such a thing. I love Victorian literature, so I can download all of it from Gutenberg and read it from such a device. But after the rootkit debacle I decided never to buy Sony if I can help it, so...

It has to be able to display these to be of interest to me:

http://www.gutenberg.org/

I do like to read contemporary works as well, (Strange and Norrell recently and Dowd's Bushworld) but I heavily favor the classics. I would not turn my nose up at proprietary formats and limited ownership times for most contemporary works since I rarely want to keep them after reading them. Stephenson's Baroque Cycle is a recent exception to that general rule (have them in hard back, looking forward to reading them again soon.)

PDFs and the ability to load one's own ASCII files would be most useful and thus a tempting electronic morsel for consumption by my eager wallet.

Very nice battery life on this unit, regardless.

I'll not whine about such company.

I would. Check out what Mark Twain had to say: Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences.

Sorry, HG Wells beat you to this invention by about 110 years. Yes, back in the 1890s he postulated a Babble Machine in When The Sleeper Wakes
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk _files=37759&pageno=86

However, I'm certain that this would not prove sufficient prior art in today's patent climate.

I highly recommend this book, as an amazing glimpse into the prescience of this man's predictions about the kinds of technologies and conveniences we would have in his future, and our today, and how they would be (mis)used.

Simple isn't it?

Granted, I've never studied this 'formal' Intelligent design stuff, but I don't think that any of them have really answered (by using the bible), the question of just how long god's days were -- especially when the earth didn't exist for the first day.
No real reason to believe that someone as godlike as, well, God would have a day the same length as ours.

In any case, I think (like the first poster) that setting an artificial barrier between God and Science -- and then using the descriptions in the bible (which were simplified no end for people who mostly had no understanding of science, or even the general concept) as the basis for an artificial pseudo-science -- are just setting themselves up to get their heads kicked in. (metaphorically speaking).

Then again, I figure these are the same kinds of people who'd freak out at the project Guttenberg people for listing The Bible's creator as "Anonymous".

The human genome will fit on a CD.
You can download The human genome project files from project gutenberg and see for yourself.

Project Gutenberg is my charity of choice. What could be greater than giving the world access to the collected works of the worlds great thinkers and writers?

Clusty is very good at what they do, but the survey people don't know enough to include it. I also use clusty.com about half of the time. I don't think clusty was a choice, so if they asked me I would have to say Google. Google has a big advantage the default home page (USA download) http://www.google.com/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls =org.mozilla:en-US:official and toolbar for Firefox. If you vary the sites you go to often who cares what website(s) you default to, just make it one you are likely to find useful (on a Windows PC a default page for updates would be good/useful for IE browser). A few years back when I worked as a student in a campus computer lab I usually could point fellow students and others to websites for information they wanted without going to any search engine (used the web enough to know the good websites without having to look them up). Google used to be listed as being in clusty's meta-searches, but now isn't listed in the FAQ.

On Google's side they do come up with lots of results and some of the papers they use in their news section are ones I normally open when I read online papers and gives a pretty good versions of other websites that are the best. It you don't know about the better alternative(s) that already exist for areas Google moves into, like http://www.ipl.org/ or http://www.gutenberg.org/ then when it comes to reading out of copyright books then the Google book project sounds very well meaning and good. Go to Amazon.com to read inside copyright books http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/catalog-guide /guide/-/506469/104-8484589-7689549, before the Google book project they had free excerpts for most books that anyone could view without signing up. If you don't want to find the best and trust Google, then like the Microsoft supporters you we use them except when you need something better and usually Google does a very job. I have toolbar for both Google and Clusty.

$ curl http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext01/wrnpc11.txt| banner -w 79 |lp -d tp

(ignore the slashdot url manglation)

Project Gutenberg has a reference to 'Planetary scanners ....$20,000+'. I'd like to scan a bunch of old books to add to my library and the project, but I'm not willing to spend $20,000+.

Do plans exist 'behind their garden wall' that would get me output which would work for OCRing?

And here's a link to the full text.

The real story of Santa Claus is at Gutenberg.

Give me that which I want, and you shall have
this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in
this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of
those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the
benevolence of the butcher the brewer, or the baker that we expect our
dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address
ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never
talk to them of our own necessities, but of their advantages.

Educate yourself before commenting. Prior constraint is wrong even when one is trying to restrain hate speech, so long as no one is making threats or inciting violence.

So you support my point.

Everyone who read our exchange is laughing at this point. I punched holes in your first argument and now you claim I support you.

I say 100,00 years ago the first signs of human intellidence appear, you say over the course of 3.5 million years. How is it we survived? According to the theory of evolution and "survival of the fittest", we shouldn't be here. But we are. Why?

We survived because our intelligence, developed over the course of 3.5 million years, advanced faster than our predators in that same time frame.

Again, you should be getting this from an anthropology text.

Look at it another way: wouldn't certain animal species that use elaborate mechanisms (think peacock) to attract mates also be more attractive to predators and easier to catch and kill? I mean a peacock can't do shit. *I* can catch one and I'm fat lazy bastard. How come they survived? And how exactly and why did they develop the way they did?

Your statement assumes that peacocks of today existed as they did before humans began domesticating animals. If you are looking for an animal that can't protect itself from predators, look at cattle. They can barely give birth to a calf due to the fact that humans have protected them from predators for thousands of years.

Evolution in action.

And don't get me wrong. I don't think reading some 4,000 year old book did it. There is some other explanation for it, and I leave it up to the scientists to figure those things out. The theory of evolution is a start, but it IS flawed or in another sense incomplete.

I would suggest reading Origins of the Species first before claiming evolution doesn't exist. It can be found here.

Hi there hpulley!

Thanks for your reply - it was more reasonable then mine and I apologise for calling you a retard (I should have said instead that your post was hasty and ill-considered).

It doesn't form part of his evolutionary work per se but he _did_ write about this. In his autobiography, he mentions things which are included in an excerpt. He began as an orthodox christian but was agnostic by the end. I still don't feel he had an agenda about it and can find no evidence of such a thing but only he really knew for sure.

OK - read the link you've provided - in it Darwin shows a tremendous respect for Christianity & talks in a calm & reasonable way about his beliefs agnostic.

At no point does he show "an anti-religious agenda". It is absurd to think he does.

Oh - and btw, there is no need to link to Amazon :-) When Gutenberg has it for free" :-)

Except for of course the line that got all the YEC's hot to begin with, right? The bit about there being no neccessity of a God to explain life?

These are books! Not paper books (...which I love...) but effective books: an entire dictionary, access to google, and even Wikipedia [snicker]

Your point is valid. I don't recall the storage capacity of these things but I'll bet (for example) they could hold a sizeable chunk of Project Gutenburg in them (among other educational materials). And, they will be able to expand the list of books if they can get access to USB CD/DVD drives. One $100 laptop with 1,000 books in it is going to go a lot further for a kid then $100 worth of dead tree editions...

Adding facility in each town to attach these to a Moodle server might also be beneficial, fwiw...