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Some other 'forgotten' authors (Seriously, Cherryh and Pohl 'forgotten'?) not mentioned.

• Stanley Weinbaum
• Katharine Burdekin aka Murray Constantine
• A Merritt
• Samuel Butler's Erewhon

Well, almost the complete works. There's one novella not yet in the public domain.

Piper's complete works at Project Gutenberg.

Go now. Your brain will love you for the rest of your life.

Dakota Smith

His output was very limited, and all set in a unified future history. It is available in two books; The Rediscovery of Man a collection of short stories, and Norstilla, a novel. His work is very unusual, so a short description does not do it justice. As Wikipedia says "Linebarger's stories are unusual, sometimes being written in narrative styles closer to traditional Chinese stories than to most English-language fiction." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cordwainer_Smith.

You can read some of his work on line. I suggest

Scanners Live in Vain" http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/1416521461/1416521461___5.htm

Game of Rat and Dragon http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29614

Some of EE Doc Smith is at gutenberg.org. Fun stuff.

Turning afterwards his attention to the regulation of the commonwealth, he corrected the calendar 68, which had for (28) some time become extremely confused, through the unwarrantable liberty which the pontiffs had taken in the article of intercalation. To such a height had this abuse proceeded, that neither the festivals designed for the harvest fell in summer, nor those for the vintage in autumn. He accommodated the year to the course of the sun, ordaining that in future it should consist of three hundred and sixty-five days without any intercalary month; and that every fourth year an intercalary day should be inserted.

Shapeshifting in the Bible? No.

Incest in the Bible? Genesis 19:30-38.

19:30 And Lot went up out of Zoar, and dwelt in the mountain, and his two daughters with him; for he feared to dwell in Zoar: and he dwelt in a cave, he and his two daughters.

19:31 And the firstborn said unto the younger, Our father is old, and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth: 19:32 Come, let us make our father drink wine, and we will lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.

19:33 And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose.

19:34 And it came to pass on the morrow, that the firstborn said unto the younger, Behold, I lay yesternight with my father: let us make him drink wine this night also; and go thou in, and lie with him, that we may preserve seed of our father.

19:35 And they made their father drink wine that night also: and the younger arose, and lay with him; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose.

19:36 Thus were both the daughters of Lot with child by their father.

19:37 And the first born bare a son, and called his name Moab: the same is the father of the Moabites unto this day.

19:38 And the younger, she also bare a son, and called his name Benammi: the same is the father of the children of Ammon unto this day.

there's a difference between a technology being instantaneous and communication being synchronous or asynchronous.

And, your point is ...? Care to spell it out for me? Please, go ahead and assume I'm an idiot. Really! I won't think less of you for it.

I'm currently reading a book ("The Anti-Christ") written by a guy (Nietzsche) who died more than a century ago. He's communicating with me via his writings. It's pretty asychronous though, since I didn't pick it up until long after he was dead. When he died, my father hadn't yet been born! I think that's pretty damned asynchronous.

Do you consider a dead tree book to be technology[*]?

It's an interesting read. He was an interesting man. It may take me a decade to make sense of what he wrote. Here's hoping I live that long.

Next, Thus Spake Zarathustra.

[*]Project Gutenberg - Authors with last name initial N.

Yet I waste *my valuable time* trying to educate the likes of you, and for what?!?

there's a difference between a technology being instantaneous and communication being synchronous or asynchronous.

And, your point is ...? Care to spell it out for me? Please, go ahead and assume I'm an idiot. Really! I won't think less of you for it.

I'm currently reading a book ("The Anti-Christ") written by a guy (Nietzsche) who died more than a century ago. He's communicating with me via his writings. It's pretty asychronous though, since I didn't pick it up until long after he was dead. When he died, my father hadn't yet been born! I think that's pretty damned asynchronous.

Do you consider a dead tree book to be technology[*]?

It's an interesting read. He was an interesting man. It may take me a decade to make sense of what he wrote. Here's hoping I live that long.

Next, Thus Spake Zarathustra.

[*]Project Gutenberg - Authors with last name initial N.

Yet I waste *my valuable time* trying to educate the likes of you, and for what?!?

Take another look. They have a few more. If you can access the .au version, I believe they have all 11.

I don't think so, piracy is piracy whether movies, books or software. It's not a big deal unless they go after sites like Project Gutenberg.

Most of what I wrote is based on Operation Sundevil, which is covered pretty well in this book:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/101/101-h/101-h.htm

There is some other information scattered around:

http://www.textfiles.com/news/2600dcr2.txt
http://www.totse2.com/totse/en/zines/cud_a/cud664.html

It is not terribly hard to find this information, if you are curious. As bad as things may have gotten in the US, we have not quite stooped to the level of China when it comes to covering up aggressive government action.

For free literature, most classics are already in the public domain. You can get many of the greatest works of literature in English free (and without violating even today's ridiculous copyright laws) at places like Project Gutenberg. Some things, like the later Barsoom novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs, are in the public domain in Australia, but not in the USA. In any case, there are a few Project Gutenberg sites. I got the first few Barsoom novels from the Project Gutenberg site for the USA (linked above), and the rest of them from the one for Australia.

Exactly correct. Free enterprise is not the same as capitalism. And corporations, which cannot exist without government sanction, are the antithesis of true free enterprise.

Readers, check out distributism. "According to distributism, the ownership of the means of production should be spread as widely as possible among the general populace, rather than being centralized under the control of the state (state socialism) or a few large businesses or wealthy private individuals (laissez-faire capitalism). A summary of distributism is found in Chesterton's statement: 'Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.'"

The only thing I would fix in that summary is "laissez-faire capitalism," which should read "state supported capitalism," where state support in the form of laws without which capitalism cannot succeed in taking over a society, is essential to the capitalism.

Think carefully before you scoff at the idea that individual enterprise, with the assistance of guilds, and obviously entailing cooperative effort where necessitated by the scale of the enterprise, is not capable of replacing, and indeed yielding superior economic results, not to mention liberty and personal fulfillment, as compared to either capitalism or socialism.

"Chesterton" refers to an early 20th century social genius, G. K. Chesterton. See What's Wrong with the World; it's free read. Try not fixating on "Catholic" as you read it; I find it is entirely inessential to the insight there presented.

Life Inc: How Corporatism Conquered the World, and How We Can Take It Back is excellent contemporary reading.

Capitalism is NOT Free Enterprise is good reading too.

Civil disobedience is flagrantly ignoring a law because it is unjust. If they ignore you, the sense of the law erodes. If they arrest you, you become a martyr. Either way you win. MegaUpload, The Pirate Bay, and all the positive things I mentioned earlier are civil disobedience.

Thanks for mentioning this. I'd even go further and emphasize that, in practicing civil disobedience, one should welcome arrest, or at the very least not go out of one's way to evade it. In the words of Thoreau, "under a government which imprisons unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."

In my view, the MegaUpload case isn't even arguably civil disobedience. First, the accused maintain they did not violate any laws, unjust or otherwise. Second, assuming they did, and assuming they believe the laws are unjust, it's quite hard to maintain the moral high ground while also using massive financial gains from violating "unjust laws" to fuel incredibly extravagant lifestyles.

In contrast, The Pirate Bay is a reasonable example. It's overt purpose is to wantonly violate what it believes are unjust copyright laws and to deny media companies the revenue they use to preempt discussion of copyright reform, and its maintainers have used whatever proceeds and attention they have gained from running the site to fuel further political action, not a fleet of expensive cars.

>> what is the MAFIAA going get?
Why, the Irish people, of course.

Of course, this solution has been proposed before:

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasie, or a ragoust.

It's a desperate move to replentish their supply of dead babies.

2nd Reply- for my definition of the Christian Concept of Human Dignity, I can think of no better work than GK Chesterton's "What is Wrong with the World and How To Fix It". Chesterton is definitely an example of rational religion- and if you like what you read at this link, I would challenge you to follow it up with Orthodoxy- for a man should not argue against a concept such as rational religion without first studying the concept.

2nd Reply- for my definition of the Christian Concept of Human Dignity, I can think of no better work than GK Chesterton's "What is Wrong with the World and How To Fix It". Chesterton is definitely an example of rational religion- and if you like what you read at this link, I would challenge you to follow it up with Orthodoxy- for a man should not argue against a concept such as rational religion without first studying the concept.

1) The full King James Bible (unillustrated, and a formidable text) in epub format is about 1.6MB. 20,000 of that would be 32GB - well within the capacity of a tablet like this, though it might raise the cost another $5. Funding better schools (even if it were possible and it's not - there's no money) will not improve the dropout rate because it arises from different social issues: the need for the students to subsist. But with this? It's a library in your pocket. For much of history a school was a log with a teacher on one end and a student on the other. Knowledge is the means the poor need to lift themselves up without outside help. As they know more, better ways to do things, they will have more leisure and the need will pass. With this the poor can take their schooling now where they need to be instead of sacrificing their needs to go to school. There are no resources to feed, clothe and house them while they do that. The poverty line in these places is $6 per YEAR. There's no lack of labor for them to teach each other to read. They're not stupid, they're just struggling too hard to take 12 years out of their youth to attend school. In some places just gathering a lot of children into a fixed place regularly is a tempting prize that makes the practice unsafe, as children are a labor pool and that's an asset too.

2) Even in the finer suburbs of America you will find folk who believe relief of subluxation of the spine can cure diabetes, that the most potent medicines are the most highly diluted, that cancer can be cured by bombarding a tumor with beta radiation. There's only so much you can do, but raising the general level of education improves the average lot. Average people are still going to be average, and half of everybody is going to be even worse.

3) The bigger danger is that the thing is an asset among folks who have few, it contains knowledge that empowers people to subsist. In some places to be caught with an asset or forbidden knowledge is near certain death. Some will be lost or broken, it's true. That's why it's essential they be cheap: so we can afford to send many of them - making them less worth stealing, making the knowledge so available it can't be forbidden. It has to be small so it can be smuggled and hidden. It has to have enough local culture, history and knowledge to be valued, and the ability to add more. It has to require no infrastructure whatever - not even power. And if we send 10 million $35 tablets to India and such places, what does it cost? $350M. For what you get that's a hell of a deal because self-sufficient people neither want nor need our other help.

We're thinking about different things. You're thinking iPad 2, I'm thinking about something completely different. I'm thinking Boy Scout Handbook x 20,000. It still doesn't happen accidentally. You don't really just airdrop these into Africa and India and North Korea. You need to have a seed of people who know what they are, to clandestinely distribute them, to teach about teaching and self-sufficiency and so on. It's not fast either.

As this year marked the passing of this brilliant man who struggled with this question all his adult life, perhaps it would be best to read it in his own words.

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/safire-us-blew-soviet-pipeline-software-trojan-horse

The US has been doing this for a long time. You can use this to strike at critical resources.

One main pillars of warfare is to cut your enemy off from resources that can help them.

Warfare is not playing fair. Anyone who thinks so is just deluding themselves. You burn their crops. You level their cities. You grind them into a pulp. Or they will rise up and attack you again in the future.

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/132

If you fight fair you put yourself at a disadvantage that your enemy can take advantage of.

That is real warfare. Anything else is just window dressing.

You can try to read a book. A real book. A fiction book.

Holy crap! I have never in my life done that before! I had no idea such a thing was even possible!

(Or, just maybe I load them onto my phone. And save the dead-tree stuff for bedside at home.)

http://www.gutenberg.org/ Pick up a wide variety of classic literature for free. Or visit your local public library and ask the librarians there to help you find the section which fits your interests. Historical non-fiction, sci-fi/fantasy, or technology/military based fiction are prevalent out there. You'd probably get more recommendations if you had said what genres you wanted to read. Things like Terry Pratchett, Tom Clancy, Dale Brown or biographies of famous people are usually my choices for reading on a trip. The one advantage of picking them up in dead-tree format is you can read them while you're sitting for an hour waiting to taxi, when MP3 players and iPad/Kindles aren't allowed to be on. The downside to that is they're heavier to carry around with you.

Some countries still have bans on some books, and it would be best to not be caught with them in your possession if you travel to one of them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_books_banned_by_governments ; for example, it would be a grave mistake to take Mein Kampf to Germany, or Zhuan Falun to China or Suicide mode d'emploi to France or Rangila Rasul to India. At best, you will be PNG'ed (Personna Non Gratta) and expelled from the country and asked to not come back. At worst, you get a free trip to a foreign prison.

Assuming you mean real, as in paper, books, take something that a bookstore at your destination(s) my be interested in exchanging for a good book from where you are going (assuming you can read the language or they yours), or just bring a book that interests you, preferrably in the destination countries primary language, and donate it to a library there when you are done with it.

If you mean pretend/electronic books, you could do worse than to simply download a wide selection of books from Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Category:Bookshelf, which could include most of the classics of Western literature, since Thomas Hardy, Jane Austin, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Edith Wharton, Daniel Defoe, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, Lewis Carroll, etc., etc. are basically all off copyright at this point, and available for download from that site.

--Terry

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27681
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3172
Lots of old stuff at Project Gutenberg

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/27681
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3172
Lots of old stuff at Project Gutenberg

Not since 1923, actually. BTW, in obtaining that link, I learned that Michael S. Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, has passed this Sept. 6. Sad.

I can't believe you left off Project Gutenberg, as they even let you download ISO images of their collection.

http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Gutenberg:The_CD_and_DVD_Project

It's called a sit-in. Just like in Greensboro North Carolina and Jackson Mississippi in the 1960's civil rights movement which resulted in desegregation of lunch counters.

Not really, because the goal of those protests was to get arrested. Indeed, getting yourself arrested is the entire point of civil disobedience:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/71/71-h/71-h.htm

Anyone who wants to do an illegal protest and then complains about being arrested is a poser. They're all hardcore, but only as long as there's no cost involved.

One of the reasons my wife got a nook was that (at the time - but you can use the kindle and other devices) was that you can borrow eBooks. Yes they expire after a time limit, but this type of stuff does keep the local library relevant, plus its already paid for by my taxes.
 
The library also publicizes these other sources of eBooks: Project Gutenburg, Open Library and the International Children's Digital Library

but thats been done already! http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8525
there clearly is a lizardman and a brontosaurus in the image version
as for gays being the products of satan, i think thats in the part of the bible of Sodom and Gomorrah... hence the word sodomy

as for other things the religious teach is (symbolically) eating jesus and drinking his blood. (communion)

Actually, I believe he would argue that some things don't need a "right".

He would say: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

These unalienable rights are called "Natural Law" and there is quite a bit written about it already.
Start with Thomas Paine's Common Sense. Very short, easy to read. Then move on to: The Law by Frederic Bastiat again, very short, very simple read. Both books are very old (>100 years old) and both books transcend time - when you read them you'll think they were written about today's events. It sounds like you're on the razors edge, I hope these books help bring you over to the light side.

Yup. Think of it like you're an ant on the surface of an expanding balloon. There is no "center" to the _surface_ of the balloon. Every point on the balloon is moving away from every other point on the balloon, and the further apart two points are, the faster they are moving apart. The "surface" of the universe is 3D though. (Read Flatland, then Sphereland.)

Which is exactly what people argued 100 years ago. Try:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7213
(My Life and Work by Henry Ford)

Alright, I agree with you that whether the Conquistadors baptized infants before slaughtering them is irrelevant, for ultimately, they were killing babies! Also, your proposition that the Spaniards would not risking the sin of murdering Christian infants is sound and I accept it. Thanks for pointing me to De las Casas work. Didn't know about him so far. The work is on Project Gutenberg. Will look it up.

That reminds me of a Watchbird by Robert Sheckley - http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/29579

If he had successfully randomly achieved a shakespeare play, [...] It would be like a flying saucer landing and informing someone that they won the galactic lottery.

It's far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, far, (...), far more improbable than that. The text of Hamlet (see Project Gutenberg) is around 180 KB long, so around 1.44 million bits. Being generous and lopping off half (since most of the characters aren't present), and then rounding down, let's say it's 500,000 bits. There are 2^500,000 possibilities; this is a number with around 150,000 decimal digits. It's comparable to the odds of winning a 1-in-a-million lottery 25 thousand times in a row.

Winning a galactic lottery, in comparison, would be extremely, almost incomparably, frequent. There are something like 300 billion stars in the Milky Way. Suppose each star had 30 planets with 100 billion "people", being very generous. That's only about one million billion billion inhabitants. Winning such a lottery would be the same as winning 4 1-in-a-million lotteries in a row. 4 versus 25,000, and that 25,000 is an exponent--these two can't just be divided to property compare them.

It's closer to winning 6 thousand galactic lotteries in a row.

Many public domain works are freely available through both the individual e-readers stores and sites like Project Gutenberg.

Cool!

Many public domain works are freely available through both the individual e-readers stores and sites like Project Gutenberg.

You know what you doing. For great justice.

... has written a heartfelt and thoughtful obituary:

http://www.gutenberg.org/w/index.php?title=Michael_S._Hart

If you want to honour Michael, go and proof a page at http://www.pgdp.net/ - the literary equivalent of pouring one out for this internet giant.

Enjoy

Link to Project Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/

The problem with communism (Marx/Engels version) is that violent revolution is part of the Communist Manifesto's implementation plan for Communism: http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61/pg61.html

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims.
They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by
the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.

In most violent revolutions the person willing and capable of exerting the most violence ends up at the top. Most such people do not give up their power once at the top.

That's why communist (and other violent) revolutions tend to end up as dictatorships.

Only a few cases (e.g. the American Revolution) are the exceptions. I'm no expert but I think the American Revolution was quite different when compared to most "communist revolutions". Seems to me that much of each state's structure was maintained rather than overthrown.

Some old memories come up from jmorris42's post recommending Relativity; The Special and the General Theory. I read that when I was in junior-high, did a book-report on it (I wish I had the book report to read now), and phoned the university to ask some anonymous physics professor questions about it. I haven't looked at it since, so I can't really judge how accessible it was.

I would say that Steven Weinberg's "Gravitation and Cosmology" was the most accessible book that I studied at university.

A book that tried to be accessible, but was all over the map was Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler's "Gravitation". If you just go through and pick and choose sections, it's probably good too.

Here's others's opinions at physics forums

You'll have to decide what you mean by "understanding" the theory. There are many different levels of understanding and only you can decide what you are comfortable with, and what level of understanding meets your needs.

For the interested.

When I was a parents basement dweller, I had a serial green screen terminal in near the toilet in my personal bathroom. I was using lynx, mutt and bitchX, on the toilet. If I was using a net connected terminal in the bathroom in 1994, the 2011 tablet usage pattern is totally unsurprising, however, back then lynx was surprisingly usable on the web .... now it is a nightmare almost everywhere except maybe http://www.gutenberg.org/ .

Genesis 7:21-23 states:

And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:
All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.
And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

So it doesn't matter how many descendants Adam and Eve had -- after the Flood, humanity was (canonically, if you take Genesis literally) down to a population of 8. Those eight were Noah, his wife, their three sons, and their sons' wives according to Genesis 7:13:

In the selfsame day entered Noah, and Shem, and Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah's wife, and the three wives of his sons with them, into the ark

Could you get as much genetic diversity starting with 8 people (five of whom, at least, were related by blood) in a short period of time?

No, a "fair wage" is enough to live decently. What you are describing is squeezing the worker until he bleeds excess profits for your company.

An excellent description of the human consequences of your "fair wage" can be found here:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/140

and an "executive summary" of the book here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Jungle

Indemnity is granted, but the one hour dispersal period is mandated in the text of the Act: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext05/rtact10h.htm . One hour is more than enough time for these looters to grab and run. Thus the Riot Act won't solve anything: it just delays action until it's too late to act. A Sacking Act that gave police blanket and permanent authority to use force to stop obvious acts of looting and arson, or that even commanded the police to keep the city from being sacked rather than hanging back and standing around half a block away waiting to get hit with bricks, would be more helpful, because it wouldn't have an hour-long getaway period.