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'They're books that embrace their physicality or have stood the test of time. They're the kinds of books the iPad can't displace because they're complete objects'

A) Leave the iPad out of this. We're talking about consuming text which isn't printed on paper, and we've been doing that since even before the *gasp* kindle.
B) Is this some kind of metaphysical crap? "they're complete objects"? WTF does that mean? I've been reading Descartes' Discourse on the Method off the screen of a netbook. Does this mean that somehow the information that I've consumed isn't "real enough"? If I printed that out on paper, read it, and then burned the paper, would that have made the content "embrace its physicality"?

Either I'm missing something, or this is a serious case of "get off my lawn".

To get a link to that story: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/29614/29614-h/29614-h.htm/

Greenland was colonized during a period of global warmth. That it is why it was named that way.

According to the Reverend J. Sephton in his book Eirik the Red's Saga, Greenland was named as a marketing ploy by Eirik: "Because," said he, "men will desire much the more to go there if the land has a good name."

Yes, it would have been warmer and greener than it was now, but if there was subterfuge in the naming of the country then I don't imagine that it was a tropical paradise. It also doesn't mean that it was as consistantly warmer across the globe as it is now.

But it is also a distraction. Do you deny that being shot by a gun could kill you, merely because other people have died without being shot. Just because it got warmer then doesn't mean that we are not causing it to get warmer now. It is getting hotter, faster and more globally than it did back then.

Man is not powerful enough to change the earth's climate to any "significant" degree. But that big thermonuclear ball in the sky is. A billion petrochemical fueled cars will not influence the sun.

Nobody has every claimed that we are making the sun hotter. This demonstrates that you really don't understand the problem. The problem is that the heat from the sun is being trapped here. As an analogy, my house stays pretty cool even on hot days without the need for air conditioning. As long as it gets cooler at night, it stays pleasant during the day. But if it stays hot at night, it doesn't get a chance to lose the build-up of heat from the previous day and it gets more unpleasant as after day. The days are not necessarily hotter, but the accumulated heat energy means that each successive day has a larger affect.

Scientists are men that can be influenced by propaganda just like any man can be. I think the climate change scare is just another way for politicians to steal our hard earned money.

The climate change "scare" as you call it was instigated by the scientists, not the politicions. They don't just watch the news and think "yeah, I had better parrot that line too". They just follow their data, and all get to the same place. It is either a giant conspiracy or the truth. Which seems the most likely.

However, if you can come up with ANY evidence to back up the claim that it is the politicians that are leading our scientists around then please present it. Oh, have a look at all those CRU emails that were released. They should be able to tell you the names of the politicians who are giving the orders (if there are any). Come back and let us know.

If you fail to see the relevance, let me recommend that you read the book. The good Reverend Dodgson knew his climate science, and his math.

... and their sources are the same circular references that got us into this mess. I'm sure that didn't escape you. If you want to show us something, don't be shy: show us what you've got.

Otherwise I'm going to stick with "Algae eat CO2. Crisis averted."

Pirate Bay is the best source for books? I don't think so. Project Gutenberg is the best source for books, unless you want technical manuals--then it depends upon what you need. There seems to be plenty of public domain and creative commons sources for those. (linux documentation prj., freebsd, lightandmatter.com, etc...)

Or were you looking for modern teeny bopper crap? Just look for "fan fiction" sites (Halo is "wonderful"), or just about any site which allows teenage girls to publish a "book." But then, those aren't any better than the penny rags of yesteryear which are already in the public domain.

Plenty of free places to legally get books. Makes me wonder why you would mention The Pirate Bay. Did some publisher pay you to do that so they could create "proof" they need DRM?

Gutenberg for one. Baen Free Library is another. There's no need to limit your book reading to current NYT bestsellers only.

The Communists have not invented the intervention of society in education; they do but seek to alter the character of that intervention, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.

and

 
Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

[snip]

10. Free education for all children in public schools.

Both from the Communist Manifesto

Public education has very much been intended to weaken family bonds and strengthen the state. Whether that becomes a religious state or a communist (atheist) state is pretty much irrelevant to those of us who want to make that choice for ourselves.

You come across as a market fundamentalist by going on about 'small government' like that in the aftermath of one of the biggest market-caused economic disasters of living memory.

You might like to check out the Communist Manifesto http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/61 and Wealth of Nations http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3300. Should you do so, you will find that our central banking system is much more heavily influenced by socialism than free market economics.

Despite the US Fed apparently being privately owned, the chairman is appointed by the government. A financial system with central price control on a product that exists only by government edict (all paper and electronic currency) is not a free market system. Banking as we know it owes its existence to legislation, so I think it is necessary to restrain it. It is not, however, by any stretch of the imagination a free market.

Supply in free markets is limited by physical reality. Supply in our financial markets is limited by the governments decision on how much money to print, reserve requirements and banking regulations. The producers of apples, for example, can't suddenly inject an extra trillion apples into the market as a stimulus. Land has to be allocated, trees grown, etc. If the only or primary limitation on supply is government I don't see how it can be considered a free market, even if private individuals and corporations participate in it.

Yes, I also take that to mean that any copyright based industry is not a free market.

You come across as a market fundamentalist by going on about 'small government' like that in the aftermath of one of the biggest market-caused economic disasters of living memory.

You might like to check out the Communist Manifesto http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/61 and Wealth of Nations http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3300. Should you do so, you will find that our central banking system is much more heavily influenced by socialism than free market economics.

Despite the US Fed apparently being privately owned, the chairman is appointed by the government. A financial system with central price control on a product that exists only by government edict (all paper and electronic currency) is not a free market system. Banking as we know it owes its existence to legislation, so I think it is necessary to restrain it. It is not, however, by any stretch of the imagination a free market.

Supply in free markets is limited by physical reality. Supply in our financial markets is limited by the governments decision on how much money to print, reserve requirements and banking regulations. The producers of apples, for example, can't suddenly inject an extra trillion apples into the market as a stimulus. Land has to be allocated, trees grown, etc. If the only or primary limitation on supply is government I don't see how it can be considered a free market, even if private individuals and corporations participate in it.

Yes, I also take that to mean that any copyright based industry is not a free market.

If only there were people willing to do that work for free...

http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/
http://books.google.com/

Did you get your books from Gutenberg? They have lots of H. Beam Piper: http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/p#a8301

Well, except for the fact the article is wrong on several accounts and so are the heirs, interesting article.

First, it was the 1997 Sono Bono copyright act that extended the copyright for the single Sherlock Holmes book published after 1922, but the rmaining Sherlock Holmes books have long ago entered the public domain. Therefore the character is public domain, but no derivative work based on the 1927 Sherlock Holmes book can be made until 2017.
But don't take my word for it, see for yourself at gutenberg.org.

Sherlock Holmes on Project Gutenberg

While I agree in part with your sentiment, it's worth noting that Doyle's actual writings *are* in the public domain.

We do have the raw blueprints that supposedly explain how it is put together as well, but we are having a bit of a problem reading those blueprints and creating a working model. Some of that is understanding the raw machinery to get everything to work, so there needs to be some work on how to move from these blueprints to organized systems, but at least we are headed in the correct general direction.

Well, my wife and I were able to produce a couple of working models that seem to be doing fairly well and exhibit what I believe is a form of intelligence, but using that system of following the blueprints is not the goal here. It also takes 18 years (give or take a few years either way) to produce an intelligence that is worth anything, and the costs of the organic matter that drives those intelligences can be extraordinarily high as well, not to mention the power consumption and other maintenance costs.

Let us tear him a new one, it is easy.

Digital piracy, long confined to music and movies, is spreading to books.

Actually, there have long been digital books, and they have long been pirated. It doesn't stop people from making a profit selling them. Also, paper books have long been digitized, then pirated digitally. They seem to still sell. This article: (-1, Sensationalist) And, I might add, it straddles the line between ignorance and fraud. It left poetic license behind several states ago.

"With the open-source culture on the Internet, the idea of ownership -- of artistic ownership -- goes away," Alexie added. "It terrifies me."

This is based on a retarded notion of what open source means. I'm not talking about the OSI definition or anything; but in any case, it remains true that both Open Source and Free Software are powered by copyright! And even the BSD license, which retains copyright notices, explicitly retains the idea of artistic ownership. In fact, that's all it does. Wikipedia asserts that Alexie considers e-Books "elitist", but that obviously makes him some kind of asshole. Here's precisely why: computers are free. You can get a shitpile computer which can certainly handle reading an eBook for literally zero dollars. Freecycle, craigslist, places like this here Slashdot... People are giving away working computers every day. And people who can't even afford the obscene $4+ price for a used paperback, let alone the egregious $8 and up for a new one (god forbid the $20+ for a hardcover) can consume eBooks for free, both legally from sources like Project Gutenberg and illegally from... well, you know. All the usual spots.

Thus, Sherman Alexie is one of the following: Either a fucking idiot flapping his yap when he has no understanding whatsoever about the technology, i.e. a petrified luddite, or a hypocrite assaulting new media because he is afraid that if everyone (including the "disadvantaged") has free access to media, he won't be making any money any more. The simple truth is that there are thousands upon thousands of books available for free in one way or another. This quote (which I picked up from Wikipedia) should set most of you at odds with him immediately: ...many of my detractors fail to see one of the negative meanings: the audience decides which source material is or is not "open." He thinks eBooks are elitist because they bring power to the masses? Very clever.

But even if one can publish and sell for profit these books, at that same time I can go to Project Gutenberg and download my own copy, and it's perfectly legitimate.

What you can go download is the original text.
Anytime you see an out of copyright work that has been re-published,
it is almost invariably edited &/or has commentary added to it.
The publishers can claim copyright on the new, edited work.

Project Gutenburg has a FAQ explaining the matter

Now the name is associated with blatantly pirated versions of books. If its current incarnation ever eeks out a profit it will certainly be sued by the entire publishing industry.

Taking classic, famous literary works that are in in the public domain, and making them available to the .... ummm .... public ...... is piracy?

Whoosh!

Now the name is associated with blatantly pirated versions of books. If its current incarnation ever eeks out a profit it will certainly be sued by the entire publishing industry.

Taking classic, famous literary works that are in in the public domain, and making them available to the .... ummm .... public ...... is piracy?

Perhaps due to no effort whatsoever made to maintain the brand, it is associated almost exclusively with one book least popular among techies.

Now the name is associated with blatantly pirated versions of books. If its current incarnation ever eeks out a profit it will certainly be sued by the entire publishing industry.

So? Project Gutenberg already has a lot of texts in French (including English and French versions of a lot of Victor Hugo's work). If Google doesn't make French books available, someone else will and they will abide by the law, rather than violating copyright and hoping that they can get away with a good settlement later. Honestly, your arguments sounds like someone saying 'if we don't grant planning permission for a pizzeria here, the mafia will just go somewhere else'.

Sounds like the ideal shape for spaceships will be spherical

That'll be boring: round ships, round planets, round explosions, and round movie goers.

Obligatory reference to Doc Smith here - Skylark of Space was first serialised in 1928. First and greatest exponent of your classical space opera. The first and subsequent versions of the Skylark were spherical. Although I would have thought, given the subject matter of his PhD, that it would have been more toroidal.

Mmmm toroids!

Check out H. Beam Piper's space battles in his book: Space Viking.

Apologies, Wikipedia must have been sourcing the large-print version, because that appears on page 40 of the Gutenberg version: http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=22786&pageno=40

Interesting that Wikipedia isn't accurate, at least according to the book it sources: from http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?pageno=72&fk_files=22786 *no occurrences of the word 'black', nor in 10 pages either side*

I have some issues with your statement, but let me only comment on one line:

"Just look at how much we "thinned the herd" with WW I and WW II."

I generally despise of people who think that a war or another atrocity would solve economic or demographic problems. Since we take so much pride in our brains we should be able to find more civilized means to deal with such issues.

The world wars didn't thin the herd either, they took about 3%-10% of the involved populations (more like a decimation, you don't kill your whole unit as a punishment, eh?). For Germany the thinning of the herd had started with a drop of the birth rate around 1890 (from 5.5 children per woman). I suppose this came through Bismarck's introduction of the pension/insurance system, maybe reduced child mortality, and industrialization.

Regarding agriculture, an undertaking that is as necessary to a society as it has an ecological impact/dependency, European countries are encouraged to be largely independent from imports. So looking at just one country might be permissible. Currently not all farmland in Germany is in use (intermittently upset by the bio-fuel fad) and I guess that we could easily support an even larger number of people. Despite simpler technology in the begin of the last century the food supply was mainly in jeopardy because of wars. The wars have hindered reproduction (the statistics say so) but there was never a credible need to start a war because of lack of food nor did the wars have much of an impact on population size (yet causing much grief).

The future might pose some difficulties regarding oil prices and agriculture being dependent on oil (fertilizer, pesticides, machinery). There might also be a developmental gap between the availability of new technologies and an oil price increase which will make things difficult. I don't see a shift to a much more agricultural society however, since you will remain more efficient with large industrial farms even if you have to run your machinery with something else than diesel.
Getting a hard limit on mechanized agriculture through the oil prize so that people can buy cheap unused land and work on it with animals and bare hands seems incredibly far fetched to me. I guess our diet might change back to a mid of the last century type however (meat only on Sundays).

Just for shits and grins, if we were to switch to Japanese agricultural methods of 1907 we could support about 150 million people. If you want to do your own haphazard calculations check here: http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/frftc10.txt and here: http://www.nationmaster.com/red/country/gm-germany/agr-agriculture&all=1

Given the overall development of a doubling of the German population since 1870 I don't really feel like we are rushing to test any ecological limits. Contrary to popular belief we are also not keeping our population size in check through wars and other calamities.

The indirect effects of our actions like deforestation of rain forests and extinction of species seems to me the more dramatic issue than what happened recently on our own soil ecologically. Europe has been under cultivation for thousands of years, and especially Germany probably has seen more habitat destruction around the time peak wood had been reached. Maybe world war three would scale back globalization similar to WW2 but how can you be certain that people will find it easier then to leave the remaining rain forests alone. Also the associated armament production/rebuilding effort would probably cause more pollution than a normal economy.

nr. 1170 on Gutenberg

Or H. Beam Piper's Day of the Moran.

Seems to appear in the canonical text...

"I'm surprised no one has written a small flash or java applet for downloading torrents. This way, they could use the power of bit torrent with the ease of a web browser for distribution."

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

Furthermore: Opera supports BitTorrent (not really brilliant but it works).

That teaching thing reminds me of The 4th R. (Fun read, even if a bit dated in some parts.) Of course implanting memories or imprints of bad experiences could cause havoc if association combined with feedback loops come into play. (Hope that's not too much a spoiler.)

As for that cloning thing, if I could do mind transfer - why not see if it works on somebody better than a clone of myself? If I had that tech, creating a scenario ala Freejack would seem more fun.

Darn skippy it's a great book, and I don't mean "a great book for its time", I mean that the works of Wells remain as superbly well written and thought provoking books even today.

If you haven't read them, then close this tab and do so right now. If you need convincing that Wells is One Of Us, then consider he also wrote the first (published) wargame rules: Little Wars; a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books.

To Mr W. was broached the idea: "I believe that if one set up a few obstacles on the floor, volumes of the British Encyclopedia and so forth, to make a Country, and moved these soldiers and guns about, one could have rather a good game, a kind of kriegspiel."...

Primitive attempts to realise the dream were interrupted by a great rustle and chattering of lady visitors. They regarded the objects upon the floor with the empty disdain of their sex for all imaginative things.

Doesn't it make you want to clench a pipe in your teeth, and strangle a prostitute? Stirring stuff.

Darn skippy it's a great book, and I don't mean "a great book for its time", I mean that the works of Wells remain as superbly well written and thought provoking books even today.

If you haven't read them, then close this tab and do so right now. If you need convincing that Wells is One Of Us, then consider he also wrote the first (published) wargame rules: Little Wars; a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books.

To Mr W. was broached the idea: "I believe that if one set up a few obstacles on the floor, volumes of the British Encyclopedia and so forth, to make a Country, and moved these soldiers and guns about, one could have rather a good game, a kind of kriegspiel."...

Primitive attempts to realise the dream were interrupted by a great rustle and chattering of lady visitors. They regarded the objects upon the floor with the empty disdain of their sex for all imaginative things.

Doesn't it make you want to clench a pipe in your teeth, and strangle a prostitute? Stirring stuff.

The "Heat Death" concept, the concept that the universe is infinite, and infinitely expanding... these just don't make sense. Gravity and Entropy both imply that the universe will not infinitely expand, but will contract back to the singularity and then expand outward again. Other theoreticians have called it "The Big Crunch"

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

If you think of time as another spatial dimension, matter and energy as being two forms of the same thing and the universe as a 4 dimensional "object" with a shape and a surface, you can envision the universe as a kind of soap bubble that has a surface tension, and the topology of that object implies gravitational forces and entropy. The "singularity" or "black hole" is the lowest common denominator state of the mass/energy of the universe.

Dark matter is also implied by such a model. I suspect dark matter to be other universes, other iterations of the singularity expanding and collapsing, similar to this one and attached to this one.

We are limited by our conception of time... we are stuck in the view that we are 3 dimensional objects that, over time, are transforming and translating within space. But time is an illusion. You, in your previous configuration, are not annihilated and replaced by this new configuration. You continue to exist at the moment of your birth and of your death just as you exist at this moment. This life of yours does not end in the sense that it is gone, but only in the sense that you are "over there". Your birth and death are a part of your surface, just like your skin is.

"God" aka "The Universe" really does not play dice. Causality exists, therefore, the future and the past abide. If the future was not connected to the past, then causality would not exist, and learning of any sort would not be possible. This isn't a new idea... this is what "Faith" was always telling you to recognize... that the universe has a shape, that causality exists, and that learning is possible. Calling the shape of the universe it's "Personality" is just a matter of terminology.

If you find this sort of thing confusing to think about, reading "Flatland" is a good way to jog the mind. Flatland and A Wrinkle in Time were the books I used to introduce these concepts to my daughter so I could explain how I look at the world to her... you can grab a copy of Flatland at Project Gutenberg.

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/97

Anything written by Rudy Rucker is good too. His book The Sex Sphere did more to make me interested in theoretical physics than any teacher I ever had.

Lovecraft was split between Lord Dunsany (aka Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Lord of Dunsany - always got a kick out of that name) and Poe - I can't quite remember the quote, but it was something like "there are my Dunsany pieces and my Poe pieces, but where are my Lovecraft pieces?"

Ursula LeGuin, Robert E Howard, and Michael Moorcock were also fans of Dunsany from what I remember. I personally have only read a few like The Sword of Welleran, which I had in a book of short stories also containing Lovecraft and Tolkien shorts (and some weird ones like Kafka), but it was by far my favorite story in the book. There are several more on Project Gutenberg (I know I've also read "Time and the Gods," but none of the others ring any bells). Unfortunately, The King of Elfland's Daughter is not there, so possibly still copyrighted (or not copied yet - I don't know).

Poe himself was a fan/critic of Nathaniel Hawthorne, a contemporary, particularly Twice Told Tales (a personal favorite of mine, as well). Can also be grabbed off of gutenberg, so it could be a cheap read. A particular favorite of mine is Dr Heidegger's Experiment. I've seen similarities in Hawthorne, Poe, and Lovecraft writings (and even Steven King, who is a Lovecraft fan, in some shorts), so its kind of interesting.

Lovecraft was split between Lord Dunsany (aka Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Lord of Dunsany - always got a kick out of that name) and Poe - I can't quite remember the quote, but it was something like "there are my Dunsany pieces and my Poe pieces, but where are my Lovecraft pieces?"

Ursula LeGuin, Robert E Howard, and Michael Moorcock were also fans of Dunsany from what I remember. I personally have only read a few like The Sword of Welleran, which I had in a book of short stories also containing Lovecraft and Tolkien shorts (and some weird ones like Kafka), but it was by far my favorite story in the book. There are several more on Project Gutenberg (I know I've also read "Time and the Gods," but none of the others ring any bells). Unfortunately, The King of Elfland's Daughter is not there, so possibly still copyrighted (or not copied yet - I don't know).

Poe himself was a fan/critic of Nathaniel Hawthorne, a contemporary, particularly Twice Told Tales (a personal favorite of mine, as well). Can also be grabbed off of gutenberg, so it could be a cheap read. A particular favorite of mine is Dr Heidegger's Experiment. I've seen similarities in Hawthorne, Poe, and Lovecraft writings (and even Steven King, who is a Lovecraft fan, in some shorts), so its kind of interesting.

Lovecraft was split between Lord Dunsany (aka Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Lord of Dunsany - always got a kick out of that name) and Poe - I can't quite remember the quote, but it was something like "there are my Dunsany pieces and my Poe pieces, but where are my Lovecraft pieces?"

Ursula LeGuin, Robert E Howard, and Michael Moorcock were also fans of Dunsany from what I remember. I personally have only read a few like The Sword of Welleran, which I had in a book of short stories also containing Lovecraft and Tolkien shorts (and some weird ones like Kafka), but it was by far my favorite story in the book. There are several more on Project Gutenberg (I know I've also read "Time and the Gods," but none of the others ring any bells). Unfortunately, The King of Elfland's Daughter is not there, so possibly still copyrighted (or not copied yet - I don't know).

Poe himself was a fan/critic of Nathaniel Hawthorne, a contemporary, particularly Twice Told Tales (a personal favorite of mine, as well). Can also be grabbed off of gutenberg, so it could be a cheap read. A particular favorite of mine is Dr Heidegger's Experiment. I've seen similarities in Hawthorne, Poe, and Lovecraft writings (and even Steven King, who is a Lovecraft fan, in some shorts), so its kind of interesting.

A friend gave me a book many years ago called "The Best of Fredric Brown" that was published in 1977. That was how I was introduced to his writing. A few of his stories can be found on Project Gutenber. I understand that another book was published in 2001 called "From these ashes: the complete short SF of Fredric Brown" that is supposed to contain over 100 of his stories.

Short stories are good!

The Last Question
The Babyeating Aliens
They're made out of Meat

For some short(er) novels try:

Slaughterhouse Five and/or The Sirens of Titan and/or Cat's Cradle
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz(for a well known fairy tale)
Then you can follow it up with the longer Wicked or The Ugly Stepsister or some other modern retelling so you can discuss the clash of a mundane world with a fantasy world.

For longer books I would recommend:
Ender's Game
Stranger in a Strange Land
and maybe The Dragon Never Sleeps

What's that in reference to? At first glance I thought you were referring to this.

The central banking system we have in the so called capitalist countries is a feature of communism[1] designed to transform the country to communism. You haven't seen the failure of capitalism, what you are seeing is the success of a communist strategy to destroy capitalism.

[1] same applies to free government schooling and progressive income tax. Reference: "The Communist Manifesto"

Wait, how is offering out-of-print books discouraging competition? I thought part of being an out-of-print book is that there is no competition because there is nobody printing the book anymore...

I think book publishers are afraid that you won't buy their latest offerings, preferring instead to download some out-of-print book you can get for free from Google. It seems unlikely, especially since you can currently download many of the classics (ie, the best-of-breed out of print books) for free from sites like Project Gutenberg.

As a photojournalist, I think it would be interesting to see just how many photos in fashion magazines are airbrushed or otherwise manipulated after the fact.

As a photojournalist -- and I don't mean this to be insulting -- you are obviously completely unaware of the publishing side of the equation, especially as it pertains to things like fashion magazines. It wouldn't be even remotely "interesting to see" how many photos in such magazines have been airbrushed/manipulated after the fact (presumably meaning after they've left the camera) because the answer is 100% of them. In fact, the only way that an unretouched photo is going to appear in a magazine like that is if they're making a specific point of showing their readers specifically what an unretouched photo looks like.

I ran a design shop specializing in advertising and package design for a bunch of years, and I can tell you from first hand experience that everything that came through the door was retouched. EVERYTHING. It could be as simple as adjusting the color balance, or removing undesirable elements like cold sores, blemishes, logos or objects (from uncontrolled locations), to taking the body/pose from one shot and adding it to a "better" head angle/facial expression from another one. (It's not unlike what they do in the movies if there are TV antennas in a shot of an 18th century cityscape.)

Instead of blaming Photoshop for people's image problems, maybe these people ought to work on addressing the utterly unrealistic assumption on the part of a vast segment of the public that everything they see in the media (print or broadcast) is appearing in some kind of pristine and natural state. (It's not just the French, there's apparently a growing push towards similar labeling in the US.) Do they not think that being able to inject regional ads into live broadcasts of TV events isn't destructively deceptive? C'mon...

If people don't get this concept on their own, then maybe the best solution is to forceably confront them with it. Make it mandatory that everyone work on their school newspapers or yearbook staff where they will be deliberately exposed to such practices (by dint of the curriculum). Like Robert Louis Stevenson said at the very beginning of The Art of Writing: "There is nothing more disenchanting to man than to be shown the springs and mechanism of any art. All our arts and occupations lie wholly on the surface; it is on the surface that we perceive their beauty, fitness, and significance; and to pry below is to be appalled by their emptiness and shocked by the coarseness of the strings and pulleys."

...then food could possibly one day be copyrighted on the genetic or even molecular level. I wrote a story which hints at this a short while ago.

If anyone's interested, Charles Darwin's book The Voyage of the Beagle is available from Gutenberg, free in both senses of the word.

thousands of years ago there was the issue of moving from trusty clay tablets to this new fangled technology called papyrus.

The Gilgamesh Epic survives to this day on 12 clay tablets. Epic of Gilgamesh

The first modern translation was in 1880. The Andrew George edition was published for general readers by the Penguin Classics in 2003.

The Penguin Classics have the virtue of being readable and read.

You can't really say that for the surviving fragments of ancient Egyptian literature. The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians [1914]

This case is looking more and more like the case that drags on in Charles Dickens' Bleak House.

I haven't quite worked out how to explain the fact that most of his redistribution so far has been from the poor to the rich (especially lots and lots of bankers), but I'm pretty sure that's somehow Marxist too.

Interestingly enough, from The Communist Manifesto

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.

These measures will of course be different in different countries.

Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equable distribution of the population over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c., &c.

Seems to be a lot there that people who wouldn't self-identify as communists would be in favour of like free public education. Interesting about the centrally controlled state bank though, although Obama could really only be said to have taken a step in the implementation of that, the formation of the Federal Reserve itself is far more significant. I'm pretty sure Obama didn't travel back in time and do that.

"Unlike trannies (no offense intended to any TG folk reading this), we intersexed people do not choose to be in the situation we are in."

I'm not sure if you're using those phrases to refer to just cross dressers or to transsexuals as well... but I can tell you for a fact that transsexuals don't choose to be in the situation they're in. (I gather cross dressers don't either, but the main difference here is that with transsexuals, your brian and body actually don't match, so it's to do with your gender and your physical sex, not at all about your sexuality. A better analogy might actually be comparing transsexuals to people who feel they should be amputees. It's all about the brain's genuine self-image.)

I'm probably not that articulate about this right now, but I've written a personal piece about this, Transitioning, and a story about it, Identity.

Please tell me how the hell does a lawsuit in USA prevent Project Gutenberg Australia from digitizing works in the public domain?

While we like to think we're the center of the universe, we aren't. As for orphaned works I don't think Project Gutenberg USA has any official stance on them, at least when I search them the only orphaned works item that comes up is an ebook published in 2008.