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Benefactor, by George H. Smith

I quite literally saw this story, then went and read a Science Fiction anthology and the above was precisely the story. :) But, then, lots of those good old science fiction short stories work out that way, so it's not enough to call it a coincidence even.

PS - For the tl;dr crowd (which is really sad, given how really, really short of a short story it is, the point is that <spoilers>Jacob Clark creates robots (aka AI) that replaces workers, the workers revolt, a war starts (that may be the cause of the extinction of humans), and Jacob Clark in his time machine accidentally stumbles upon his future generation machines that upon seeing him damaged decide to take him to be repaired...and disassemble him for the journey</spoilers>.

Downloading free music is perfectly legal. Apple just claimed that 23 million people downloaded a free U2 album. That's perfectly legal. I've probably downloaded about 500 songs that were free. Legally. Quite a few books and audiobooks as well.

There are tons of free books at http://www.gutenberg.org/ and tons of free audiobooks at librivox.org . JSB's complete works for organ at http://www.blockmrecords.org/b... .

I would have hoped that the FBI would know the difference between "free" and "illegal".

If you will read the whole book instead of the quote you'll see that he went on to point out the necessity of government regulation in the market and that corporate charters are a great danger to civilization and so should be granted only as a last resort.

He understood that the quote you put up only works if Me, the butcher, the brewer, and the baker are on roughly equal footing in terms of financial power. When all of them but me are billionaires, it all falls apart.

REALLY, read An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, it's even free!

While you can always reach for a pithy quote to support an attitude of mistrust of government by misportraying Adam Smith as calling for the state to stay completely hands off, actually reading the man's work reveals that he too saw a need for some degree of state regulation to avoid problems like monopolies. The man saw the benefits in a more laissez faire system, but he also foresaw pitfalls that have come to plague us today.

But are you really able to get those books for free?

Yep, I just download them from Project Gutenberg. I wonder what year they get to host free movies?

The finest single work of fiction concerning the relationship of religion to life on other worlds was Mark Twain's "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven".

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebook...

Twain's Captain Stormfield dies and makes his way to Heaven, to find that Heaven is inhabited with uncounted numbers of souls from billions of different planets; every planet has its own Redeemer, but all represent the same God.

The idea that God is human is laughable; any religion that restricts God to a single planet, or even a single galaxy, is thinking much too narrowly! If there is a God, a Supreme Being (a topic on which I reserve judgment, having no knowledge and only limited faith), He/She/It must be truly supreme in the universe(s).

And indeed, like science and engineering are linked, so too are philosophy and science. Perhaps the biggest issue I've noticed in the scientific world is a lack of any concern for the epistemological theories that the world of Philosophy has worked on since the days of Descartes. In his day, the goal of science was to provide TRUTH about the universe, and it was the role of the philosophers to rationally show the basis on which this truth could be known.

Well, this is 2014. We've had David Hume long since come along, and in his attempt to do what others who came before him had tried (yet got hung up on logical fallacies such as Descartes ran into), he pretty clearly laid bare some very significant limitations to human understanding (see: Treatise on Human Nature). So much so that while he never advocated abandoning science, he did have a hard time really framing it in light of his work, and spent years doing little but playing backgammon in the park.

Fast forward, we have Kant, attempting to reconcile this, with the notions of the understanding forming the foundation of reality, or at least, the reality that we as humans live our experiential existence in, providing room for value despite not actually being able to know anything about things in themselves. Science is merely a map of the territory of our experience, then, and our experience in turn is theorized anyway to be a sort of map of the hypothetical underpinning reality. One whose accuracy we can't really know anything about whatsoever. Science is useful for navigating our way around the world-to-humans, and can give us great leaps in understanding the interplay of our world (as well as how to manipulate it with engineering), but beyond that is the realm of metaphysics.

And then we get into the phenomenological school, which was heavily founded on Kant's works, but really just stops bothering to pay lip service to this essentially mythical "real world" outside of human experience, because at some point, it became pretty apparent that talking about the universe outside of human experience was akin to talking about what angels dancing on pinheads. I'll spare you my clumsy attempt at summing up existentialism and phenomenological epistemology, but suffice to say, it's essentially the state of the art in the field...and when understood by scientists to be the grounding for a theoretical framework in which to catalog their discoveries, has a pretty nicely humbling effect that would serve greatly to push back against the trend of dogmatic "science".

For whatever reason, though, chances are, unless you majored in philosophy or went out of your way to read it on your own, this will be the first time you've been familiarized with these folks and their theories (and really, if that's the case, please go google...anything other than the absolute contemporary stuff is 100% public domain...which definitely made my college career cheaper). Be it simply a matter of having to make room in the educational curriculum by getting rid of SOMETHING or just a general failure to see importance, it's this lack that I feel is in large part to blame on people getting the picture without the frame, so to speak, and applying all manner of misconceptions to the limited scientific understanding that is imparted to them. I'd hope, at the very least, that some echo of the material works its way into the curriculum for those specializing in science, but of this matter I'll admit I'm not terribly familiar, so I'll leave it up to those who've had that background to clarify.

http://www.mobileread.com/ --- forum for books where the members create nicely formatted books, and are willing to fix errors when reported
http://www.gutenberg.org/ --- mass-produced books by the masses --- getting errors fixed is a bit more difficult, but can be made to happen

http://onlinebooks.library.upe... --- The Online Books Page, John Mark Ockerbloom's attempt to list all freely available electronic versions of printed texts.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ is a good one for older books.

But the ebook thing isn't an issue for me. I buy hard copy for like 90% of my books.

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

> Primarily because the school boards aren't in the business of
> writing textbooks or funding the creation of the same.

Classical English literature
===================
you can get Shakespeare's works *FREE* from project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ebook...

Astronomy
========
http://nineplanets.org/ (yeah, the website name is an anachronism) *FREE* and since it's a website, you don't need to order and pay for a new edition each time new discoveries are made

Evolution
=======
Tree of Life Project http://tolweb.org/tree/

Dinosaur Specific http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/d... *FREE* and since it's a website, you don't need to order and pay for a new edition each time new discoveries are made

For those fundamentalist schools who don't believe in evolution Project Gutenberg has the King James Bible and the Douay-Rheims version

A school district should be able to get a good chunk of its needs free off the web. Most of these sites will easily give permission to download and duplicate. Instead of handing out 16 KG of books to each student, hand out 16-gigabyte USB keys to each student with the necessary e-books and/or mirrored websites.

It perversely makes me think of The Adventures of Pinocchio. In the story Pinocchio turns into a donkey, a beast of burden, because he skips school and has fun instead. Grigori is the reverse, somebody who very likely found success in their efforts by not becoming another cog in the machine, i.e. going to college for years and then chasing green all their days.

A better translation of Rubiat 51 is:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Notice "Piety nor Wit". See http://www.gutenberg.org/files...

Best calculus book ever was Calculus Made Easy. It really makes the subject as clear as possible. Everything since is filler.

That does look like a great text. 2nd edition in 1914!

Best calculus book ever was Calculus Made Easy. It really makes the subject as clear as possible. Everything since is filler.

"Thus [integral symbol] dx means the sum of all the little bits of x; or [integral symbol] dt means the sum of all the little bits of t. Ordinary mathematicians call this symbol “the integral of.” Now any fool can see that if x is considered as made up of a lot of little bits, each of which is called dx, if you add them all up together you get the sum of all the dx’s, (which is the same thing as the whole of x). The word “integral” simply means “the whole.”"

I may have to revise my earlier statement that a good freshman calculus text can last decades. This book may demonstrate that one can last over a century (1910 publication date).

Thanks.

Best calculus book ever was Calculus Made Easy. It really makes the subject as clear as possible. Everything since is filler.

UM, apparently you are not familiar with the history of the parties in this country. It is the Democrats who try to judge people according to their racial purity(and always has been).

Actually, it's the bigoted assholes of all stripes who try to judge people according to all kinds of stupid measures. To clarify your point and the previous poster's, it worked like this:
1. Lincoln (a Republican -- no real ideological relation to the current Republican party), goosed long and hard enough by the abolitionists and the thought of all those slaves rising up against their captors, "freed" (I use quotes because most of those enslaved didn't live in states controlled by the Union army) the slaves.
2. After the US Civil War, the people who thought it was okay to own other people were really pissed off when they lost their privilege and their human possessions became Democrats (again, no real ideological relation to the current Democratic party) because they were against the party of Lincoln.
3. Things stayed this way for about 80 or so years until various members of the Democratic party saw the rise of the Middle Class after WWII and wanted a piece of that populist pie. This culminated in the early to mid 1960s when LBJ pushed through various civil rights laws.
4. Those aforementioned pissed off people were so enraged that their party would turn against their bigoted constituents, that when Nixon, using coded racist language, pulled a goodly number of those from the Democratic party to the Republican party.

Yes, this is simplistic and does not include a great deal of detail which would describe the evolution of the R and D parties into their current configurations. The point is that labels are just that. If you're a bigoted scumbag, it doesn't matter what your party affiliation is, nor do party affiliations really tell us anything about whether a person is good or bad.

Besides, these days both parties represent the Corporate Entities of America rather than the people of the United States.

It appalls me that so many people seem to be ignorant of their own history. It's not just sad. It may well be catastrophic. As Santayana famously remarked in his The Life of Reason :

Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. [Emphasis added]

Sigh.

a century ago, the same sorts of complaints were being made:
see The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell.

Its the aftermath of the A-bomb that was so gruesome.

No, it was the actual event that killed almost everyone, residual radiation killed relatively few compared to the initial blast. I highly recommend the US Army's Strategic Bombing Survey's work "THE ATOMIC BOMBINGS OF HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI" , the definitive work on the subject and about as horrible a read as you'll find.

I was told 'Just So' by Rudyard Kipling:

How the Leopard got his spots

I remember reading about this!

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebook...

Itunes is for profit. Lovers of preservation of old text is on Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/

Sounds like a business opportunity for someone, jump on it.
There's a tidy selection of "old books" (really old) on http://www.gutenberg.org/

Try buying Spinozas Philosophy in paper, it's expensive but you can get it at Gutenberg for free.

Life of Solon by Plutarch

XVII. First of all, then, he repealed all the laws of Drakon, except those relating to murder, because of their harshness and the excessive punishments which they awarded. For death was the punishment for almost every offence, so that even men convicted of idleness were executed, and those who stole pot-herbs or fruits suffered just like sacrilegious robbers and murderers. So that Demades afterwards made the joke that Drakon's laws were not written with ink, but with blood. It is said that Drakon himself, when asked why he had fixed the punishment of death for most offences, answered that he considered these lesser crimes to deserve it, and he had no greater punishment for more important ones.

(emphasis mine)

...if you have bandwidth, eventually you'll find a use for it.

Sounds a lot like Project Gutenberg

It stands for the value of 'a' raised to the power of e (roughly 2.71828). Now, while Euler's number is damn sexy, I'm not sure why he kept putting his hands on it...

B) probably shouldn't consider the democratic process as a kind of war

Politics is war without bullets, to paraphrase von Clausewitz.*

In other parts of the world, where assassinations and the like are common, that definition is a bit more flexible.

The reality is that the top political positions in the US are the most powerful positions in the world. And they are bitterly contested. While the face the parties must present to the public is of little girls with pink bows in their hair, puppy dogs and rainbows, to the politicians and their dedicated operatives, it is a vicious business. And the RNC accidentally revealed a bit of that.

It's like in Vietnam. There was the "Studies and Observations Group" - SOG. A mild name for a commando unit carrying out dangerous and deadly special operations. It's useful to keep the public focused on their bread and circuses, except when it becomes necessary to alarm them so as to rally to your cause (left or right).
-----------------

* "We see, therefore, that War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means." -- "On War", von Clausewitz

The article is just blithering without much useful content. They couldn't even get the right illustration. The steam engine shown is just some random engine with Corliss valve gear. This is the engine that powered much of the 1876 exhibition. It was big, impressive, and inefficient, even for that exhibition.

The "Internet of Things" may be the Next Big Thing from the industry that brought you 3D TV.

Why? it's a butchered quote, and incorrect.
the paragraph:

"This is the real meaning of that mystery which appears so prominently in the lives of great sceptics, which appears with especial prominence in the life of Charles II. I mean their constant oscillation between atheism and Roman Catholicism. Roman Catholicism is indeed a great and fixed and formidable system, but so is atheism. Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas, more daring than the vision of a palpable day of judgment. For it is the assertion of a universal negative; for a man to say that there is no God in the universe is like saying that there are no insects in any of the stars."

Is essay is in here:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files...

He talks about Charles II and basically claims pascal wager; which has also been shown to be false..more correct: a horrible argument.

" for a man to say that there is no God in the universe is like saying that there are no insects in any of the stars."
He seems to overlook the fact that I can actually find insect, document them experiment, and it can be confirmed by others.

I actual study religion for a long time; which is why I am atheist.

For all your non-DRM, out of copyright (mostly, some creative commons material as well) ebook needs: http://www.gutenberg.org/

Also check out the proof reading project where material for Project Gutenberg is produced, http://www.pgdp.net/

Unfortunately this is no longer a growing domain. The length of copyright extends before anything can become "out of copyright".

Project Guttenberg is around since 1971. Ebooks (and in particular, public ones) didn't started with Kindle.

For all your non-DRM, out of copyright (mostly, some creative commons material as well) ebook needs: http://www.gutenberg.org/

Also check out the proof reading project where material for Project Gutenberg is produced, http://www.pgdp.net/

Cheap desktop computers running free operating systems. You can install Ubuntu or some other *nix distro free on pretty much any old used computer.

WiFi access. I would imagine that your internet bill will likely be your biggest long-term expense. You can get some pretty awesome consumer routers, install DD-WRT on them or tomato USB or whatever) and get some pretty fancy functionality. I've been eyeing this one.

And maybe the most affordable ebook readers or tablets for checkout. You might get a sponsorship from Google or Amazon -- they are all too anxious to rope people into their ebook ecosystems. I would try to avoid these book ecosystems for cost reasons. You can also get all kinds of amazing old books through project gutenberg. Maybe OLPC would have a suitable device?

You might also keep some physical books of historical interest or perhaps large maps or other visually oriented works that resist digitization.

"[they believe they have found an algorithm that might] predict which fiction books will be successful. Their algorithm had as much as an 84 percent accuracy rate when applied to already published manuscripts in Project Gutenberg and other sources."

I can predict the success rate of already published books with 100% accuracy.

Backtesting is usually bogus because it means nothing unless the experimenter can precisely enumerate the total number of rules that were formulated and discarded--including those formulated and discarded intuitively--before arriving at the one that tested well. If you consider 100 possible systems, the chances that at least one of them will test with results significant at the 1% level is 63%.

Also, "A Tale of Two Cities" IS in the Project Gutenberg database, right here, which doesn't give me much confidence in anything else they say...

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:General_FAQ#G.13._How_does_Project_Gutenberg_choose_books_to_publish.3F

All-volunteer; what people scan and proofread is what's there, after a copyright check. Some things that were popular and are therefore common; some things that were always rare and therefore an enthusiast scanned a copy; some things people sought out to fill out a subject heading. There's *lots* of old light fiction, adventure stories and social comedies, that no-one's cared about for a century. (I find it fascinating what changed, and what didn't, and what changed *first*. I love old B-side books.)

You'll like this

Seconded. Coincidentally, just a few weeks ago I was pseudo-randomly websurfing and came upon the wikipedia articles about the so-called Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. I easily spent two evenings reading about those journeys and the men - and animals - that undertook them. Fascinating stuff.

One of the participants in one of the expeditions was Apsley Cherry-Garrard. He subsequently wrote a book, "The Worst Journey In The World", which is on Project Gutenberg's site http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14363 In the preface of the book he wrote a semi-famous couple of lines

For a joint scientific and geographical piece of organization, give me Scott; for a Winter Journey, Wilson; for a dash to the Pole and nothing else, Amundsen: and if I am in the devil of a hole and want to get out of it, give me Shackleton every time.

After reading about Shackleton's harrowing Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Trans-Antarctic_Expedition it's not surprising that the IAU named a crater on the Moon for him. Shackleton didn't fuck around. When he said he was coming back for you, by god he was coming back for you.

Hey, its even a New Year's Story. If you take a moment to understand the picture he's painting, it'll give you some good perspective on your life. eBook Here

Iain M Banks Culture series, some of the best SciFi I have ever read, I still chuckle every time I think of the drone bringing the body-less human head (still alive) the gift of a hat.

I had the pleasure to find this, it is (they are) a BRUTAL read, but it was worth it.
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/473

There is a big difference between what someone believes and what someone says they believe. The main cause is needing to belong. Someone may say they believe something to fit into the mold they want even though they actually believe something quite different.

Walter Lippman wrote about that as far back 1922 (along with some startlingly modern-seeming comments about people's need to obsess about the personal life of celebrities to make up for the fact that they don't know anything about the people next door). In short, his thesis is that most people don't have fully fleshed-out opinions on most subjects. Instead, people know only a few things, and adopt other views as symbols of which 'team' they support. Their views are no more susceptible of rational analysis than a sports fan is capable of explaining exactly why they care so much about the team they follow.

Evolution is a subject that doesn't directly affect most people's life unless they work in the biological or (some) medical fields. A person's beliefs have practically no impact on his or her life - you can still benefit from modern medicine while denying the theories that makes it work. People's beliefs about evolution are therefore a perfect candidate for symbolism. When people say "I don't believe in evolution", the vast majority are not making any sort of statement about science at all. Instead they are proclaiming their allegiance - "I am not one of those 'intellectuals' with their fancy theories - I believe in families and community" (as if scientists were all polygamist stoners...).

Vote Ron Paul and squash the NSA, the Fed, and all these stupid agencies that seek to turn our world into 1984

Stupid agencies like OSHA and the EPA and the FTC who make sure I don't have the liberty to filthy my neighbor's water and air, take away my God-given right to run a dangerous workplace, my right to fuck over my customers?

Sorry, Kid, but I was alive before the EPA and OSHA. If there had been an EPA when I was a kid the air wouldn't have burned my lungs when we drove past Monsanto. If there had been an OSHA in 1959 my grandfather (who died because Purina was too damned cheap to put doors on the elevator) would have lived another quarter century.

I guess you'd get rid of the FDA and bring back snake oil salesmen and Upton Sinclair's The Jungle?

Because that's exactly what government is for -- keeping you from fucking me over. Things like roads and fire stations and schools are just icing on the cake.

The merit of having leadership determined by bloodline is, as Chesterton observed in Heretics in 1905, that it is about as good as having leadership determined at random. Sometimes the new king will be a good man and sometimes a bad one; there should be "no trace whatever of any nonsense about intellect or special fitness for the post." But even if it's done via a "democratic" election, selecting a despot by their oratory or their brilliance or whatever else gives you monsters and not men.

The misadventures of the despots of the last hundred years, whether fascist, communist, "Bolivarian," or whatever else, has made Chesterton's remarks seem prescient.

It's not a right at all, but a privilege. I don't believe in inherent rights to begin with. Rights do not vanish with time.

Doesn't compute. Maybe you should start here.

Can I expect to be able to access my collection of e-books in 40 years? I highly doubt that

The first ebook was made available in 1971. Here we are 42 years later and it's still available.

Your doubts are unfounded. Stop spreading FUD.

Exactly ... as the price of books go down, the demand for books increase. This is basic Econ 101. By setting a price floor, you are limiting the ability to reach customers who would otherwise want to buy more books.

No matter how cheap books are, you are still only able to read one or two per day. Therefore the demand is capped. On the other hand, two books are not inerchangeable unless they're copies of the same book; even if Amazon was giving books away for free, it might still be worse deal than keeping lots of small bookstores in business and thus ensuring that a single seller doesn't have a total power to determine what books and authors get on the market.

Maybe you should take a few more Econ classes.

If I have Ã100 in my pocket how many books am I going to walk out the store with?

Start with these. If it's sheer quantity you want, that should set you up for life.

There's something about sitting down with a book that just doesn't work as well with a digital device, at least not yet.

It isn't the device, it is your familiarity and comfort with it.

Pocketwatches lost the battle even though they could be more easily read when a generation got used to the wristwatch. Wristwatches are currently losing their battle, despite being really convenient to look at quickly and having batteries that last for a year or more without maintenance, to the cell phone that has the time displayed on the front. A cell phone has to be pulled out of a pocket to look at, a button or two pressed, and their batteries need repeated recharging on a regular nearly daily basis. You can't "butt dial" your BFF when you sit on your wristwatch, either. Wristwatches are clearly superior devices.

I wear one because I grew up wearing one and I'm more comfortable looking at my wrist to see what time it is than pulling the new-fangled phone out of my pocket. You read dead-paper books for fun because you grew up reading dead-paper books for fun and haven't grown up having more books that you could read in your lifetime available online for free on your ebook reader.

My first Sony reader came with my selection of 100 free classics. If I could manage two books a week, it would take a year to read them all. Then I could get another 1000 for free from a lot of places (MobiRead is one of my favorites.) That's 9 years more at two a week. Project Gutenberg has an uncountable (in the sense of "one, two, three, infinity") number of free books, including the entire series of Tom Swift (just one example.)

Your children pick up computers more easily than you, on average, because they have grown up with them. They'll pick up on ebooks that way, too.

There's something about sitting down with a book that just doesn't work as well with a digital device, at least not yet.

It isn't the device, it is your familiarity and comfort with it.

Pocketwatches lost the battle even though they could be more easily read when a generation got used to the wristwatch. Wristwatches are currently losing their battle, despite being really convenient to look at quickly and having batteries that last for a year or more without maintenance, to the cell phone that has the time displayed on the front. A cell phone has to be pulled out of a pocket to look at, a button or two pressed, and their batteries need repeated recharging on a regular nearly daily basis. You can't "butt dial" your BFF when you sit on your wristwatch, either. Wristwatches are clearly superior devices.

I wear one because I grew up wearing one and I'm more comfortable looking at my wrist to see what time it is than pulling the new-fangled phone out of my pocket. You read dead-paper books for fun because you grew up reading dead-paper books for fun and haven't grown up having more books that you could read in your lifetime available online for free on your ebook reader.

My first Sony reader came with my selection of 100 free classics. If I could manage two books a week, it would take a year to read them all. Then I could get another 1000 for free from a lot of places (MobiRead is one of my favorites.) That's 9 years more at two a week. Project Gutenberg has an uncountable (in the sense of "one, two, three, infinity") number of free books, including the entire series of Tom Swift (just one example.)

Your children pick up computers more easily than you, on average, because they have grown up with them. They'll pick up on ebooks that way, too.

You'd need an Omnilingual (by H. Beam Piper).

http://www.gutenberg.org/

This reminds me of SF short story, where people came up with idea of robotic doves (birds) acting as police and paralysing people who wanted to commit murder. But they had to adapt to do the job properly - to detect intent even in most ruthless killers. Soon they started to prevent people killing insects. After that, it was not possible to switch off TV set. And solution for that was to create self-evolving robotic killer hawks to catch the doves... anybody knows what was the name of the story, cannot find it now?

You're looking for Robert Sheckley's 1953 short story Watchbird , via Project Gutenberg. There was a TV adaptation in 2007's Season 1, Episode 6, Masters of Science Fiction.

Great read.