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While the episode aired in 1993, Pi to a million digits was published by the Gutenberg project on 1993-01-01.

Why'd they have to contact NASA? And don't give me any crap about it being 1993; Project Gutenberg's pi to a million digits was released before 1993.

--grendel drago

You mean this has already been done.

People will just think that they paid $15 for a book and will keep it. The libraries won't have any books left.

Want to buy a book? Go to a bookstore.

Want to borrow a book? Provide identification, get a borrows card, and check out a book from your library.

Don't want to share your personal information in order to borrow a book? Too bad. Don't like it? Fine, go here

Try this, you alienated greedy little capitalist!

(oh, to the mods: :) )

How many are there I made and posted my first torrent here http://linuxtracker.org/ how many sites can we list to make use of my idle bandwidth I seed linux torrents and other legal stuff like 10,000 free legal books http://www.gutenberg.org/ http://www.gutenberg.org/cdproject/ http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu:6969/ use you spare bandwidth to help the World torrents are like guns its how you use it that counts!

How many are there I made and posted my first torrent here http://linuxtracker.org/ how many sites can we list to make use of my idle bandwidth I seed linux torrents and other legal stuff like 10,000 free legal books http://www.gutenberg.org/ http://www.gutenberg.org/cdproject/ http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu:6969/ use you spare bandwidth to help the World torrents are like guns its how you use it that counts!

It was in this way that I came to an understaning that technology is not read-only; not simply a malevolent behemoth controlled by presidents and CEO's to manipulate a passive citizenry; but is in fact waiting to be created and tinkered with by such inquiring minds as my (former) self. Although my initial motives may have been anti-social I have since been able to contribute to society in a way that is, on balance, positive. I hope PHRACK continues to inspire others in the same way.

That and Steven Levy's Hackers probably saved me from a destiny as an ineffectual philosophy professor or some other brand of malcontent fat-assed intellectual.

I have no objection to Google Print. I'd be happy to see them make Fair Use of copyrighted works. I agree with you, though, that they should use Gutenberg editions of things like The Canterbury Tales.

There's a serious problem here in inviting publishers to submit their material. Publishers seem eager to submit their reprints -- for which they only have copyright over the book's design -- of public domain works. As a result, completely free works are listed in Google Print as "Copyrighted Material" -- in turn, allowing the publisher to misappropriate copyright w/in G. Print over written material they do not have copyright over.

See, for example, The Canterbury Tales in Google Print. This was written in the 1300s. I would very much like to see Penguin's proof of copyright over the works of Chaucer, who died in 1400.

Likewise, see Romeo and Juliet , written by Shakespeare, who died in 1616. Or The Legend of Sleepy Hollow , first published in 1819. Clearly no present-day entity has copyright over any of these works. Regardless, the publishers who have submitted their versions of them are able to enforce a 3-page-view limit on them without legal right to do so.

Google Print should be scrapped, and instead, the spotlight shined on Project Gutenberg.

So that means that it's the other thousandth that kills 11,000 Americans each year. Try as you may, I really don't think that BitTorrent is responsible for that much damage. It's not like BitTorrent goes around and rapes your pets or anything if you use it.

Do you not still have a knife for self-defense? You can go hunting with a bow. Poisons, traps and pheromones work well for varmit removal and are overwhelmingly the preferred method. I have fun playing with Jacks. You don't need to punch holes in something to have fun. Well you might, and if that's the case I have a pneumatic drill you can borrow. But only if you ask nicely.

I'd also would like to know where that %5/95% statistic came from. Because it sounds like a rectal figure. You are forgetting all of the several hundred megabyte Linux ISOs BitTorrent serves. What about Windows SP2? It was available via BitTorrent after the release. Sites with large videos, such as AMV sites, offer torrents. Video Game Speedruns offer torrents more often than not. How about Project Gutenberg?

I think that you should open the blinders from your eyes, stop petting your goddamn gun and lauding the wonders of a fast moving hunk of metal, and rejoin civil society.

I'm not saying you shouldn't own a gun. Just for chrissakes realize that it isn't the be all and end all for the entire world.

And to all the BitTorrent users out there. If you find Fifi behind your computer with a ruptured anus two weeks from now... we never talked.

Listen, if we didn't give you useless links, what would you spend your day reading?

Seriously though, how about linking to a less-annoying version of Quicktime?

Evolution works by the frequencies of different genes and gene sequences changing due to changing external conditions.

The post I replied to (was it yours, AC?) was trying to make the case that, because some of the precise phenomenologies had not been quite understood, it means that all of evolution is nonsense.

...but aren't Wikipedia and Project Gutenberg honking great content archives?

They're not children's books, but are childrens' books always the best medium? What stands in the way of extending Gutenberg to include those, anyway?

Sorry, after a quick check on the Santayana quote, it should read: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. -- George Santayana "The Life of Reason"

Now compare this little girl's work to that of the average slashdot poster, who incorrectly spells words like "lose" and can't correctly place an apostrophe even by sheer luck. Truly awesome.

back when it was "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" by Steven Levy.

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/729

Mod me down if you wish, but I have to say that I found Google Print nice, but not too useful. Sure, it's a nice thing that you can search through paper books, but in most cases you can't actually read them; you have to buy them, and this even goes for classics such as "20,000 leagues under the sea" which are already digitized by Project Gutenberg or similar organizations: Google digitizes newer, copyrighted editions even when there are older, public domain editions available. Thus, in my eyes Google Print is little more than a marketing door for on-line bookstores.

On the other hand, French digitalization project Gallica, though sometimes mocked on Slashdot, not only digitizes books, but gives the scans away freely (as in speech), so everyone can read the books in entirety or use them as they please. Both Distributed Proofreaders and Distributed Proofreaders Europe already use Gallica scans to produce completely digitized and free e-books which you can search, read, datamine, or do with them anything that suits you. If Slashdot readers are supporters of free software, this too is something they should revere.

I hope that Europeans will not compete with Google. I hope that they will make bigger, better, and more diverse Gallica.

On the one hand, Bill's not personally guarding the integrity and privacy of the blackbox file, it's being done by (more corruptable/hackable) software. And on the other, "Ulysses, Peer of Gods In Counsel" he ain't.

So glad to see a ground swell of unhappiness with the lousy deals the music industry is offering. P2P has reduced distribution costs to nearly nothing. So the industry gets more, artists get more, and what do we get? Nothing! We get pushed a line of garbage about how it's such a privilege to download music legally, be allowed to choose 1/15 of the music at only 1/15th of the price (let's see.. basic math: 1/15 divided by 1/15 equals... same price), and that because capitalism is good, and DRM is vital to the industry's ability to participate in capitalism, we should gladly embrace DRM. Remember, if you download music for free, you download communism! Except that DRM does not work. DRM will never work. I am offended by the insult to our intelligence, the constant pushing of stupid DRM tricks, the waste of money on DRM and on lobbying efforts against our interests, and the bad deals. How much less could music cost if the money wasted was instead passed back to the consumers?

We'd be better served if we'd donate some of our collections to public libraries. I do find it soothing to imagine the outrage of those greedy fools whenever I borrow a CD from the library, and, well, you know. (Bless the Patriot Act for making libraries want to destroy all records of who checked out what.) Enjoying music would be far more efficiently done with P2P of course, but in the meantime, bricks and mortar libraries can serve. I would love to see more performances of out of copyright works in Project Gutenberg.

So thats, lets see, 123,652,830 Bibles and about a Torah worth of change transferred, or a sustainted transfer rate of 141 Bps (Bibles per second), with enough room to send an extra Old Testament over the wire every second, too.

Kafkaesque is not about turning into bugs. Not only does Gregor in The Metamorphosis not turn into a bug,
but a "monstrous vermin", I found the text to be quite the opposite of what it is perceived as. It is not a nightmarish vision,
but a view on how people perceive someones circumstances more sad than they themselves. It is quite a happy reading with a
sad but hopeful end.

The verb kafkaesque is used as a description of a certain situation which resembles his writing-style. While I have not read much
of Kafka (except The Metamorphosis) my impression is that kafkaesque is used in opressing (imminent danger) or surreal (bizarre
or dreamlike) situations.

So, it's actually used right in this TFA.

There is no way the i2hub will be shut down haha. The fact that it is high-profile is one of its strengths as well as its weaknesses - people do share many legal things on i2hub also. For example, unlicensed anime, linux isos, books (speed = much better than say Project Gutenberg's website), and many other things.

The RIAA is just trying to be a bully once more but it won't work...the i2hub is not the RIAA's-music-sharing-hub, it is much more. So fuck off RIAA.

Also, I am not quite sure whether the RIAA is allowed to snoop on i2hub anyways.

And furthermore, all of the music coming from the big labels suck ass - go find some real music - college is one of the easiest places to learn of music outside of the big labels.

This is certaintly true about corporate web pages. However, personal web page, especially geared towards technical users, could, in theory, create markup that doesn't look as good in IE.

For example, in firefox gutenberg.org looks really nice. In IE (IE 5.0 at least) this site is usable, but has much less slick CSS.

Sites like this can get away with optimizing web pages for post-IE browsers.

Fictionwise sells ebooks, but they also have free novels, short stories and audio books from time to time. Currently they have 26 items available for free, including a lot of sci-fi.

Audible

Audible sells audio books, but they have some free items also. There is a new free item every week or so for subscribers.

ereader

ereader has a few free ebooks. During December last year, they had a different free ebook each day for a few weeks.

Audio Books for Free

AudioBooksForFree has free audio books, but in a very compressed format. You have to pay to get better quality, but for $100 you can buy everything.

Baen Books

Baen Books has a free library with sci-fi books.

Project Gutenberg

This one has been pointed out a few times, but it is the biggest. It is here and here. I think the first one is the official site.

Check out your local library and see if they're registered with NetLibrary, it's free if your library is registered with them. They have a decent collection of books.

Adobe offers a few free ebooks, both fiction and non-fiction. However, let me warn you, they are DRM'd.

Then there is also the Gutenberg Project as many others have already mentioned.

If you are using MS Reader, then Microsoft offers some free books as well.

Gutenburg

http://www.gutenberg.org/

gus

On the bright side, this is from the BBC, so it's not the US educational system at fault. =)

The last seven or eight books I've read have been e-books on my phone (Treo 650). And I didn't have to pay per page for it, either: Plucker plus Project Gutenberg plus stuff like the Baen Free Library for more recent titles equals a big bookshelf's worth of free-of-charge books in my pocket wherever I go.

I suppose it's kinda neat that non-PDA phones can read books this way, but downloading bits at a time? The way American phone companies gouge you for data usage, fees would pile up quick.

piracy is just people wanting to get stuff for free.

True enough. But filesharing is not just people wanting to get stuff for free, which is the point of this court case.

What am I getting for free by spending a big chunk of my web server's bandwidth allocation seeding a torrent of the Project Gutenberg DVD, for example? (If you're downloading that and one of your peers is sending you a couple megabits/sec of data, that's probably me. You're welcome!) If Grokster and company lose this suit, it will quite possibly become illegal for me to give out that collection of free, unquestionably legal, public-domain works. What a victory for the public good that would be!

"May I ask you: if a corporation felt that a law was "bad" would it acceptable for it to break the law?"

The result? a bunch of low res image in locked PDF (can't select and copy) of some two hundred years books

And it's far more important to culture to scan the latest Photoshop books? The reason you can't select and copy is because there's no OCR.

which have been stupidly spent for a totaly useless project!

The Gallica archive at BNF has been a wonderful source for Distributed Proofreaders and from them, Project Gutenberg, with BHF's blessing. Their scans have been far from useless.

Shakespeare was published long enough ago to be indisputably in the public domain everywhere, so how can a Shakespeare text be copyrighted?

There are two possibilities:

1. The author or publisher has changed or edited the text enough to qualify as a "new edition", which gets a "new copyright".

2. The publisher has added extra material, such as an introduction, critical essays, footnotes, or an index. This extra material is new, and the publisher owns the copyright on it.

The problem with these practices is that a publisher, having added this copyrighted material, or edited the text even in a minor way, may simply put a copyright notice on the whole book, even though the main part of it--the text itself--is in the public domain! And as time goes on, the number of original surviving books that can be proved to be in the public domain grows smaller and smaller; and meanwhile publishers are cranking out more and more editions that have copyright notices. Eventually it becomes harder and harder to prove that a particular book is in the public domain, since there are few pre-1923 copies available as evidence.

A special case, that isn't quite a new edition, is when someone "marks up" a public domain text in, for example, HTML. Where this happens, the text is in the public domain, but the markup is copyrighted. We've already seen that when an editor adds footnotes to a public domain text, he owns copyright on the footnotes but not on the text: similarly, when he adds markup to the text, he owns copyright on the markup.

Want some good stuff? Visit Project Gutenberg's CD page where you can download ISOs with thousands of free (public domain) eBooks, including via BitTorrent. Plus, each search for a Project Gutenberg eBook at the search page includes a MagnetLink, suitable for p2p clients.

The point is that this is all entirely legal, legitimate content -- including many of the great literary works people are already reading in schools around the world!

Want some good stuff? Visit Project Gutenberg's CD page where you can download ISOs with thousands of free (public domain) eBooks, including via BitTorrent. Plus, each search for a Project Gutenberg eBook at the search page includes a MagnetLink, suitable for p2p clients.

The point is that this is all entirely legal, legitimate content -- including many of the great literary works people are already reading in schools around the world!

Most people don't want to learn "big words" such as "pyrotechnic", "facetious", "colloquial", or "penultimate" when simpler phrases such as "explosive devices", "bad joke", "local slang", and "second to ultimate" can be used just as well.

Swift said much the same thing. A linguist, Elizabeth Elstob, working on Anglo-Saxon at the time, used the preface of her grammar to rip his article to pieces and demonstrate the power of monosyllables in English. http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/1/5/3/2/15329/15329- h/15329-h.htm

Have you ever read Einstein's Relativity: The special and general theory? Ok, I didn't think so. Most people assume that it's full of equations that a normal (read non-genius) person wouldn't have a chance of understanding. But its not. Pop over to Project Gutenberg and pick up a copy. It's quite readable and full of examples about poles and clouds and railroad cars and embankments and lightning. Sure there's some math, but less than the typical high school calculus book.

What I'm trying to say is that if Einstein had posted on slashdot, you'd probably have made fun of his examples and said he didn't know what he was talking about. But its exactly the kind of speculative thinking that is exhibited in this thread that led to the theory of relativity.

In my considered opinion, Evolution was manufactured with a view to supporting a God-less universe

Lamarck, Darwin, Wallace and others were people who struggled for quite some time to come to terms with what they observed in nature(mutability of species). They struggled to explain this mutability within the prevailing paradigm. That paradigm was based on what they had been told by people of religion was the origin of these species as created kinds. That paradigm had to be overturned as it could not be reconciled with the observed facts.

Darwin certainly was not an atheist when he wrote "The Origin of the Species" (have you read it? or Excerpt from Kenneth Miller's "Finding Darwin's God") His faith in God lapsed in later years for completely different reasons (the reconcilliation of suffering with the idea of a just God)

Evolution was not manufactured. It happens, regardless of belief. Natural Selection is an excellent theory that can be applied to explain this observable fact and used to make predictions about other observations regarding the past as well as predictions of expected outcomes such as breeding or clinical trials for example.

Interestingly, the link you gave is spelled correctly, however, the search didn't search the url
text apparently.

Project Gutenberg

Main Page:
http://www.gutenberg.org/

Download Page:
http://www.gutenberg.org/cdproject/

Direct Torrent Page:
http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu:6969/

Direct edonkey2000/emule link:
ed2k:7Cfile7CTheProjectGutenbergDVDDecember2003Edi tionpgdvdiso7C41396469767C02CEB6E1E07A0CDC98757134 B0678B147C

Other links for ftp, etc available at the main download page.

Main Page:
http://www.gutenberg.org/

Download Page:
http://www.gutenberg.org/cdproject/

Direct Torrent Page:
http://snowy.arsc.alaska.edu:6969/

Direct edonkey2000/emule link:
ed2k:7Cfile7CTheProjectGutenbergDVDDecember2003Edi tionpgdvdiso7C41396469767C02CEB6E1E07A0CDC98757134 B0678B147C

Other links for ftp, etc available at the main download page.

"It'll be interestin to see how publishers deal with this if demand for these books declines." Oh Pah-Leese! Project Gutenberg has been around for 34 years (started in 1971 by Michael Hart) and I don't seem to recall any publishers recoiling in horror. Sure, many of the 15,000 books they have available online (or available on CD) are post-copyright, but there is a lot of great reading there. That Google is scanning Gutenberg, or perhaps even buying their CD's and publishing isn't wrong or bad and won't make anyone go broke. But maybe, just maybe a few people will read some great old stories.

I am all for digitizing our libraries. But some of the texts are already in ebook form. Why don't they just return results from Project Gutenberg?

I know if I am looking for books on Sherlock Holmes, it won't be through Google Print. I am going straight to Gutenberg.

FAQ entry on books with updated copyright dates

So there you go.

It's my understanding that they can't re-copyright the actual text. However, they can copyright the presentation, line editting, page breaks and whatnot. So you could take the actual text from them, you couldn't take the text in that presentation from them.

Fun huh?.

Kirby

Project Gutenberg's got it in plain text, which is better in almost every way.

...and we immediately see the problem with scanning the books into their database. Take Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, for instance. The book has entered the public domain, and you can access the Project Gutenberg book here.

Google's copy, however, is scanned from the PenguinClassics version, which is copyrighted (the formatting, and images). So, on Google Books, you are unable to read the book, even though it has enetered the public domain.

You get used to reading from a small screen pretty quickly, though I was never one for getting headaches from staring at a monitor too long anyway.

Do they read those from Project Gutenberg? I'm not sure how many do.

While I get excited about the prospect of "free" literature, I find that I don't take advantage of it. The main reason is that I don't feel like reading a novel while sitting in front of the computer. This is especially difficult to do while sitting on the toilet, or on a plane or train, or on a toilet on a plane or a train. Sure, I could bring a laptop, but it's a lot more cumbersome than a paperback.

I've considered printing them out, but this would be much more expensive than just purchasing a paperback (or, in a lot of cases, hardback) edition, even using my antique laserjet. This might make some sense for rare OOP books, that's about it.

What we need is a really cheap, really good e-book reader that accepts multiple and non-proprietary formats.

Last I checked Oliver Twist was written by Charles Dickens whose been dead for over 125 years. I was sure this fell under public domain, but I could be wrong.

Makes you wonder. At some point here there's going to start to be battles over who owns the rights to sections of the bible! Where will it end? (might clean up the 10 commandments issues as a simple copyright infringment. :)