Slashdot Mirror

BTW, you can actually have a Poag-idiot-detector if you like. It's in code now:

Pogo 3.0RC10 .. Everything you need to build one is in the docs. Here's the development blog: Pogo's Development Blog

Anyway, to offer a rebuttal to your froth:

1) I dont own a cell phone, because I dont like them. I find them irritating ball-and-chain solutions meant to trade convenience for meaningful contact. The only people who call me are the ones I want to be able to call me. The rest can email me, or visit me. And no, I don't care if you think differently. You have to understand, i'm talking to someone who's paying $50/mo to be aggrevated, and knows it.

2) If I have email going to my voicemail, and voicemail going to my email, that means I have twice the maintenance hassle, and twice the confusion. How is convoluting a situation going to make it better?

3) Usenet, moron. USENET. Jesus...

BTW, you can actually have a Poag-idiot-detector if you like. It's in code now:

Pogo 3.0RC10 .. Everything you need to build one is in the docs. Here's the development blog: Pogo's Development Blog

Anyway, to offer a rebuttal to your froth:

1) I dont own a cell phone, because I dont like them. I find them irritating ball-and-chain solutions meant to trade convenience for meaningful contact. The only people who call me are the ones I want to be able to call me. The rest can email me, or visit me. And no, I don't care if you think differently. You have to understand, i'm talking to someone who's paying $50/mo to be aggrevated, and knows it.

2) If I have email going to my voicemail, and voicemail going to my email, that means I have twice the maintenance hassle, and twice the confusion. How is convoluting a situation going to make it better?

3) Usenet, moron. USENET. Jesus...

I suspect that this high performance is only attainable for the field the GPU is specialized for, i.e. graphics-related things. Or isn't it?

It is for "more specialised" tasks but it certainly isn't restricted to graphics. Computation such as FFTs and Fluid Flow is also possible.

If, like me, you couldn't get through the home page, this sort of thing (including, IIRC, Brook) was discussed at Siggraph and also
this year's Graphics Hardware conference.
Scroll down to the "Panel: GPUs as Stream Processors" and "Session 4: Simulation and Computation" sections for slides.

ESR, never shy of controversy, writes in his blog: Salaries are dropping. Time to celebrate! . He claims that the outsourcing trend will ultimately benefit Americans; that's just how the free market works. You may not agree with him but read it anyway for an alternate viewpoint.

It's also worth noting that Bob Young founded the Center for the Public Domain, which is among other things partly responsible for iBiblio, Creative Commons and the Eldred v. Ashcroft case (which McBride directly attacks in his letter).

Good question, though not too hard to research as there's a volume of data and it's a hot issue. Of course, it's controversial, since much of the research is influenced by agribusiness (esp. here in Canada -- AgCan is in industry's pocket) and that means that research is overly reductionist or just plain skewed.

Keywords to look for in your reference search: loss of topsoil in green revolution scenarios (effects of tilling, bare soil, industrial watering, monocrops, heavy feeding crops, pesticides); dependence of farming on chemical inputs; loss of seed sovereignty; crop diversity reduction; the effects of large-scale monocropping on the environment; water usage; permaculture; loss of local knowledge (microclimates, local pest management, seed varieties --again--, plant companions, etc); misguided pest management (overused pesticides etc.); distribution and ownership models that reduce local food security; and so on.

Some good places to start looking outside of google:
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
Sustainable Farming Connection
FarmFolk/CityFolk
The Ram's Horn
World Resources Institute
WorldWatch Institute
Pesticide Action Network
Sustainable Agriculture Network
Permaculture
ETC Group

There, that should get you started. You want evidence? there's plenty out there.

Good question, though not too hard to research as there's a volume of data and it's a hot issue. Of course, it's controversial, since much of the research is influenced by agribusiness (esp. here in Canada -- AgCan is in industry's pocket) and that means that research is overly reductionist or just plain skewed.

Keywords to look for in your reference search: loss of topsoil in green revolution scenarios (effects of tilling, bare soil, industrial watering, monocrops, heavy feeding crops, pesticides); dependence of farming on chemical inputs; loss of seed sovereignty; crop diversity reduction; the effects of large-scale monocropping on the environment; water usage; permaculture; loss of local knowledge (microclimates, local pest management, seed varieties --again--, plant companions, etc); misguided pest management (overused pesticides etc.); distribution and ownership models that reduce local food security; and so on.

Some good places to start looking outside of google:
Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy
Sustainable Farming Connection
FarmFolk/CityFolk
The Ram's Horn
World Resources Institute
WorldWatch Institute
Pesticide Action Network
Sustainable Agriculture Network
Permaculture
ETC Group

There, that should get you started. You want evidence? there's plenty out there.

Then you don't have to syncronize.

If you haven't already installed SSH on a machine in both locations, do so.

Follow the "Setting up Samba over SSH Tunnel mini-HOWTO" by Mark Williamson . Then you can use the server on each side to share out the files on the other side and not even change anything about how your users do anything. It's very simple to set up. It's 3 steps on each side plus adding it into a log in script or mapping on the individual machines. So you should be ready in 5 minutes.

If you still want to syncronize, there are tons of tools to do that including Unison.

Please come to the site; we should be able to handle the Slashdot crowd.

Purgatory?

Classic (from article)

You're.. it?

The new Battlestar Galacica is like Monet's water lilies... It reminds you of the original series, but it's certainly its own creation. Or perhaps like building a car out of Legos-- you get the shape of the car right, but it's not a precise rendition.

There are countless tips of the hat to the 1979 version, from pictures of what the Cylon Centurions looked like in the original series to explanations of why the Galactica used 1970s technology during a time where man could create Cylons and advanced space travel. Purists who expected the series to be faithful to the original should have learned their lesson from Jar Jar Binks. If they were going to be faithful, why not just "digitally remaster" the originals as has been popular for a decade? Maybe they could replace all the guns with walkie talkies or the Cylons could shoot first all the time?

The premise has changed somewhere between a lot and a little, depending on what was important to you. The sex has been kicked up a notch, but I believe it's as sexy in contemporary times as the original was in 1979. I really enjoyed this flick and would enjoy seeing a new series built around the four hour effort.

If you ever played Starflight or Starflight 2, then the new Cylon ships may remind you of the Uhlek / Uhl-Leghk ships.

that they need to run IBM's mainframe operating systems on their desktop.

Hey, I do run an IBM mainframe operating system on my desktop. (Although admittedly, not very often. But it does run faster than any hardware that the OS was explicitly designed for.)

Although come to think of it, anyone running Linux is also running an IBM mainframe operating sytem.

this articles a good read so take the time to go through it as it summarises innovation from the early internet years to date.

innovation. The trick is finding that one crazy idea. The problem with crazy ideas, though, is that for every one good crazy idea, there's a thousand bad crazy ideas

the eternal quest for an idea. you better start with a good idea. if you don't, no matter how hard you try it wont pan out.

the Internet community back then, the key technical people, didn't want the Internet to become easy to use or graphical, ... Only smart people could use the Internet ...so we needed to keep it hard to use

what other examples can you think of right now?... only smart people can use [insert you own example]

Mosaic started with 12 users in February 1993. It had 1,000 users within three or four weeks. About 10,000 users by spring. It was up to 1 million by early 1994

Posters who question why Andreessen has such prominence should reflect on this. No Mosaic (mozilla), no Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE Based on NCSA Mosaic code base licensed from Spyglass), no World Wide Web in the early to mid 90's. No doubt someone else may have invented the browser but how much longer would it have taken?

At first that makes you like a little bunny rabbit ... Everybody wants to play with you ....within a year ... fearsome competitors shooting at your head with high-powered ammunition

Larry, Sergi do you feel the hot breath of the MS juggernaut as you approach your IPO. Will google will be a repeat of Netscape/MS tussle?

Oracle database was a huge success ... Larry's spent the last 25 years trying to come up with the next product

it sure helps when the government (CIA) is your preferred backer. Why does oracle feel the need to keep trying to re-innovate or create the next best idea?

innovation comes from companies that are 2 years old, populated by 19-year-olds ... preposterous that Marc should think that innovation is .. the province of little entrepreneurial companies.

In fact it's both. The technical revolution was spurred on the back of the transistor. This was the combined effort of Bardeen, Brattain and shockley at Bell Labs - no small comany there ... but look at Intel, though a big company now, it was started with the (not so young) Noyce, Moore and Grove. What about the Linux kernel, third person shooters and that other search engine, Yahoo?

I don't have the resources to follow the development kernels, so at this time no work on VPN Masquerade for 2.3.x or 2.4.x has taken place. If you know someone who is working on this, please let me know.

his biography.

Are the md5 sums posted here incorrect?

They say

790f1ccf98ef5b5ef8f266483c9e4d74 mepis-2003.10.cd1.iso
2c240df396828e90e88dc77b784f12db mepis-2003.10.cd2.iso

But I get these

[rob@kate rob]$ md5sum mepis-2003.10.cd1.iso
6cc4bb826d7305ebb549b19219a5a1c4 mepis-2003.10.cd1.iso
[rob@kate rob]$ md5sum mepis-2003.10.cd2.iso
c96cea5c97028b13e353a7a9f37264df mepis-2003.10.cd2.iso

Nah, I think Doctor Fun knows where they're going with all this DRM stuff.

Elliotte Rusty Harold has also written "Processing XML with Java", which, in the first chapter makes a case for XML vs flat files.

// Magnus

I should deceive the expectation of the reader, if I passed in silence the fate of the Alexandrian library, as it is described by the learned Abulpharagius.

The spirit of Amrou was more curious and liberal than that of his brethren, and in his leisure hours, the Arabian chief was pleased with the conversation of John, the last disciple of Ammonius, and who derived the surname of Philoponus from his laborious studies of grammar and philosophy. Emboldened by this familiar intercourse, Philoponus presumed to solicit a gift, inestimable in his opinion, contemptible in that of the Barbarians -- the royal library, which alone, among the spoils of Alexandria, had not been appropriated by the visit and the seal of the conqueror. Amrou was inclined to gratify the wish of the grammarian, but his rigid integrity refused to alienate the minutest object without the consent of the caliph; and the well-known answer of Omar was inspired by the ignorance of a fanatic. "If these writings of the Greeks agree with the book of God, they are useless, and need not be preserved: if they disagree, they are pernicious, and ought to be destroyed." The sentence was executed with blind obedience: the volumes of paper or parchment were distributed to the four thousand baths of the city; and such was their incredible multitude, that six months were barely sufficient for the consumption of this precious fuel.

Since the "Dynasties" of Abulpharagius have been given to the world in a Latin version, the tale has been repeatedly transcribed; and every scholar, with pious indignation, has deplored the irreparable shipwreck of the learning, the arts, and the genius, of antiquity.

For my own part, I am strongly tempted to deny both the fact and the consequences. The fact is indeed marvelous. "Read and wonder!" says the historian himself: and the solitary report of a stranger who wrote at the end of six hundred years on the confines of Media, is overbalanced by the silence of two annalist of a more early date, both Christians, both natives of Egypt, and the most ancient of whom, the patriarch Eutychius, has amply described the conquest of Alexandria. The rigid sentence of Omar is repugnant to the sound and orthodox precept of the Mohammedan casuists, they expressly declare, that the religious books of the Jews and Christians, which are acquired by the right of war, should never be committed to the flames; and that the works of profane science, historians or poets, physicians or philosophers, may be lawfully applied to the use of the faithful. A more destructive zeal may perhaps be attributed to the first successors of Mohammed; yet in this instance, the conflagration would have speedily expired in the deficiency of materials.

I should not recapitulate the disasters of the Alexandrian library, the involuntary flame that was kindled by Caesar in his own defense, or the mischievous bigotry of the Christians, who studied to destroy the monuments of idolatry. But if we gradually descend from the age of the Antonines to that of Theodosius, we shall learn from a chain of contemporary witnesses, that the royal palace and the temple of Serapis no longer contained the four, or the seven, hundred thousand volumes, which had been assembled by the curiosity and magnificence of the Ptolemies. Perhaps the church and seat of the patriarchs might be enriched with a repository of books; but if the ponderous mass of Arian and Monophysite controversy were indeed consumed in the public baths, a philosopher may allow, with a smile, that it was ultimately devoted to the benefit of mankind.

Now go back and read that quote again. That's right. Edward Gibbon says it did not happen.

Has anyone ever been fired or denied employment due to the discovery of an ancient usenet post?

Yes. I personally know of one very senior researcher confronted by a review board with his posts about good places for gay cruising!

Unless I remove them, I will soon get to deal with the much more fun aspect of, "Dad, what's an acid trip and where did you go when you took them?" from my daughter.

Yes, you can remove usenet posts from Google Groups.

Saying that the US was not interested in surrender is incorrect.

The US was interested in UNCONDITIONAL surrender. The Japanese wanted to maintain parts of their current political system.

The US decided that removing the system that decided to make an un-provoked attack on Pearl Harbor, attack and occupy parts of China, and wage war across the Pacific, was the only way that we would accept surrender. We had made that very clear. But, the Japanese officials were more interested in their honor, than in saving their own people.

In fact, we did offer surrender to the Japanese a few weeks before the first atomic bomb was dropped. But, the Japanese government, the Supreme War Council specifically, did not want to agree to the terms set. Here are some excerpts from the offer of surrender that we presented to Japan, via the Swedish government. Check out the paragraph marked '(5)', stated very clearly, we will not deviate from these terms. Japan wanted to continue to play games, and did not agree to the what was offered.

(4) The time has come for Japan to decide whether she will continue to be controlled by those self-willed militaristic advisers whose unintelligent calculations have brought the Empire of Japan to the threshold of annihilation, or whether she will follow the path of reason.

(5) Following are our terms. We will not deviate from them. There are no alternatives. We shall brook no delay.

(6) There must be eliminated for all time the authority and influence of those who have deceived and misled the people of Japan into embarking on world conquest, for we insist that a new order of peace, security and justice will be impossible until irresponsible militarism is driven from the world.

You can see many other supporting documents here:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/war.term/093_03.html

In fact, it was not the first bomb that caused the Supreme War Council (SWC) to agree to surrender, nor was it the second. The SWC did not agree to surrender until we dropped leaflets in Japan describing to the Japanese people the decisions that the SWC had made up until that point.

It was the insane focus on 'honor' by the SWC that took them way too far down a road that they should have never taken.

ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/cdimages/ pgdvd.iso (md5sum 59d8a193874349181122ff52e2e3e114, size 4139646976)

Help yourself, make a bunch of copies, and be sure to give them away! If you'd like to donate a few copies (or a few hundred) for the giveaway, drop me an email

Here, educate yourself. Then quit wearing your amorality as a badge of honor. Just because you've gotten too lazy, cynical, and/or greedy to care about the larger consequences of your actions, don't expect me to join you.

Sure, the world is a complex place, far more so than you or I could ever hope to sort out. But that complexity requires constant interrogation, and a willingness to change in the face of new information. Instead, I get the impression that you've pared the problem down to "How can I get the most for me and mine." It certainly becomes more manageable to see the world in those terms.

I'm sorry. I know you're mostly being facetious with me, and you probably think I'm taking this way too seriously. But it's a bit of a sore spot with me. I just cannot accept that the world is "good enough," nor do I believe that we are powerless to change it, because we were the ones who created it.

...just hope you don't run into this guy.

Vint Cerf told me that Al Gore was in fact the strongest early supporter of making the old ArpaNet into the public utility we call the Internet. Without Gore's technical understanding and power in the U.S. Congress, it would have taken much longer.

For those who can remember back that far, there were many ArpaNet users who did now want the system open to the public. There was intense opposition to making the system open to commercial interests, too. Al Gore was a true visionary, in this case.

Yes, because ESR is so mature and objective.

Oh yeah? I own earth...There is some hefty payback from civilization that I am owed.

Lets see. A couple of billion ...$10 bucks a pop.

Crap...my income taxes are going to suck this year. Nevermind.

No, I think you're quite wrong. I've read the book quite a few times and I don't remember the moon being mentioned. In fact, I think you'll find this passage (courtesy of Gutenberg) enlightening:

`I looked for the building I knew. Then my eye travelled along to the figure of the White Sphinx upon the pedestal of bronze, growing distinct as the light of the rising moon grew brighter.

In Wells' version, the downfall of men came not from some great catastrophe, but from the haugtiness of the "Rich Upper Class" and the mutations brought about by the underground toil of the "Working Class". The irony was that the masters became the slaves and the slaves became the masters.

The new movie screwed everything up and overall made very little sense. If you want to see a movie true to the book, go rent the 1960's version. The only thing they added was nuclear war (an unheard of concept in Wells' time).

After you find out you really like iTunes you will be OK. OK that is until you find out all 10,000 songs on your iPod Suck!

I on the other hand will be just fine. Just fine that is until the RIAA deploy their Anti-Vinyl Mobile.

Just be glad I didn't figure out a way to segway into the Evil Toilet vs. Evil Toilet Plunger in this post.

Does iTunes allow you to browse what they have in their catalog before signing up? That was another of the kewl things about emusic.com.

After you find out you really like iTunes you will be OK. OK that is until you find out all 10,000 songs on your iPod Suck!

I on the other hand will be just fine. Just fine that is until the RIAA deploy their Anti-Vinyl Mobile.

Just be glad I didn't figure out a way to segway into the Evil Toilet vs. Evil Toilet Plunger in this post.

Does iTunes allow you to browse what they have in their catalog before signing up? That was another of the kewl things about emusic.com.

We've already paid for that. The U.S. Census Bureau's Tiger map database. You can get the files on CD or DVD, or via ftp. You'll need GIS software. Try GRASS.

Wiki's seem good, but they miss one important aspect, structure to the documents. Details about plants neetly fall in to a number of catagories Latin/Botanical name, Common name, growing habit, etc. What I'd like to do is take wiki type concept but add more structure to the data. This could help with searching. Also some fields such as height have numeric values and it would be great to search for plants with a specific height.

Anyone come across such ideas or software which could do such a thing?

BTW I'm suprised how down most slashdotters are on colaborative documents. There are some really good colaborative encyclopedia around wikipedia Planet Math. So whats wrong with OpenContent!

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other- formats/html_single/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html

That's the big one.

I can't at the moment remember where I read the "IDE disks RAID" howto; there doesn't seem to be an official HOWTO that matches what I remember. I can summarize it for you easily, though: IDE RAID is just fine, as long as you have one IDE disk per IDE controller. Those cables that let you hook up two drives to one controller? Don't use them. This means that for most motherboards, you will only be able to hook up two drives, and if you want to do RAID 5 you will need a PCI IDE controller board.

Why only one driver per controller? Two reasons: first, IDE sucks with multiple devices so performance suffers; second, if an IDE drive dies, it might confuse the controller, which would take out another drive if both drives are on the same controller. RAID can survive one drive out but not two!

If you need to have a CD or DVD on your RAID computer, and it is an IDE device, hook it up to one of the controllers on the motherboard. I have never yet gotten a CD or DVD to work with a PCI IDE controller. I haven't tried it recently, so maybe with the latest devices it might work. (I sure hope it works with SATA!)

As for NFS, I just read the NFS HOWTO:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other- formats/html_single/NFS-HOWTO.html

My Linux distribution had already set up the NFS server software, so I just needed to set up the config files.

steveha

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other- formats/html_single/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html

That's the big one.

I can't at the moment remember where I read the "IDE disks RAID" howto; there doesn't seem to be an official HOWTO that matches what I remember. I can summarize it for you easily, though: IDE RAID is just fine, as long as you have one IDE disk per IDE controller. Those cables that let you hook up two drives to one controller? Don't use them. This means that for most motherboards, you will only be able to hook up two drives, and if you want to do RAID 5 you will need a PCI IDE controller board.

Why only one driver per controller? Two reasons: first, IDE sucks with multiple devices so performance suffers; second, if an IDE drive dies, it might confuse the controller, which would take out another drive if both drives are on the same controller. RAID can survive one drive out but not two!

If you need to have a CD or DVD on your RAID computer, and it is an IDE device, hook it up to one of the controllers on the motherboard. I have never yet gotten a CD or DVD to work with a PCI IDE controller. I haven't tried it recently, so maybe with the latest devices it might work. (I sure hope it works with SATA!)

As for NFS, I just read the NFS HOWTO:

http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/docs/HOWTO/other- formats/html_single/NFS-HOWTO.html

My Linux distribution had already set up the NFS server software, so I just needed to set up the config files.

steveha

Redhat.

//distro.ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/distributions/redha t/beta/mustang/

Here's a couple of examples.

Be able to search for specific keywords based on the captions. It sort of like Dr. Fun's cartoon online.

Happy Birthday to You, the four-line ditty was written as a classroom greeting in 1893 by two Louisville teachers, Mildred J. Hill, an authority on Negro spirituals, and Dr. Patty Smith Hill, professor emeritus of education at Columbia University.
The melody of the song Happy Birthday to You was composed by Mildred J. Hill, a schoolteacher born in Louisville, KY, on June 27, 1859. The song was first published in 1893, with the lyrics written by her sister, Patty Smith Hill, as "Good Morning To All."

Happy Birthday to You was copyrighted in 1935 and renewed in 1963. The song was apparently written in 1893, but first copyrighted in 1935 after a lawsuit (reported in the New York Times of August 15, 1934, p.19 col. 6)

In 1988, Birch Tree Group, Ltd. sold the rights of the song to Warner Communications (along with all other assets) for an estimated $25 million (considerably more than a song). (reported in Time, Jan 2, 1989 v133 n1 p88(1)

In the 80s, the song Happy Birthday to You was believed to generate about $1 million in royalties annually. With Auld Lang Syne and For He's a Jolly Good Fellow, it is among the three most popular songs in the English language. (reported in Time, Jan 2, 1989 v133 n1 p88(1)

Happy Birthday to You continues to bring in approximately 2 million dollars in licensing revenue each year, at least as of 1996 accounting, according to Warner Chappell and a Forbes magazine article. [Source]

Hmm..

Did somebody say "a compact, fast, extensible GUI with an incredibly small memory footprint?"

*grin*..

Pogo 3.0 might be what you're looking for. Doesn't depend on gtk, Qt, or anything. Just Imlib1.

Hmm..

Did somebody say "a compact, fast, extensible GUI with an incredibly small memory footprint?"

*grin*..

Pogo 3.0 might be what you're looking for. Doesn't depend on gtk, Qt, or anything. Just Imlib1.

Goddamn VBulletin has me brainwashed.

Ahh, much better -- Picture of a hard drive shot w/ a .357

Don't forget to check out the recently released OpenOffice.org 1.1. Unlike previous versions of OpenOffice.org, it has wonderful font handling, looks like a native application, improved office file formats support, and most importantly, it's FAST. Now it only takes about 4 seconds to load on my machine, compared to around 30 for 1.0. Download it now.

Windows Version
Linux version
Other versions

Don't forget to check out the recently released OpenOffice.org 1.1. Unlike previous versions of OpenOffice.org, it has wonderful font handling, looks like a native application, improved office file formats support, and most importantly, it's FAST. Now it only takes about 4 seconds to load on my machine, compared to around 30 for 1.0. Download it now.

Windows Version
Linux version
Other versions

Speaking of Beowulf...

• Translations and other transformations of public domain works (such transformations get their own copyright, but we're seeing more that comes in with CreativeCommons or similar licenses)
• Copyrighted works submitted by contemporary authors. We have a standard non-exclusive permission procedure for this, see our HOWTO at ibiblio.org/gutenberg
• Works from 1922 through 1964 that were not renewed. While proving non-renewal has historically been very hard, we are working to make this much easier by digitizing renewal records. In the hundreds of years of copyright registration, only about 10% is ever renewed -- that means that literally millions of items that were registered from 1922-1964 are now public domain, but we need proof from the renewal records. More our copyright howto at the site mentioned above.
• 2018 is nearly upon us. If copyright is not extended further, we'll once again start getting a year's work added to the public domain each year. (That was the case, until the Bono act of 1998 halted this growth of the public domain for 20 years)

Also, we continue to work with the EFF and ACLU to challenge copyright extension activities. You can expect a rigorous challenge, if YACTE (Yet Another Copyright Term Extension) is proposed in Congress (there were 14 extensions during the 20th century!).

• Greg (Project Gutenberg's CEO

• Translations and other transformations of public domain works (such transformations get their own copyright, but we're seeing more that comes in with CreativeCommons or similar licenses)
• Copyrighted works submitted by contemporary authors. We have a standard non-exclusive permission procedure for this, see our HOWTO at ibiblio.org/gutenberg
• Works from 1922 through 1964 that were not renewed. While proving non-renewal has historically been very hard, we are working to make this much easier by digitizing renewal records. In the hundreds of years of copyright registration, only about 10% is ever renewed -- that means that literally millions of items that were registered from 1922-1964 are now public domain, but we need proof from the renewal records. More our copyright howto at the site mentioned above.
• 2018 is nearly upon us. If copyright is not extended further, we'll once again start getting a year's work added to the public domain each year. (That was the case, until the Bono act of 1998 halted this growth of the public domain for 20 years)

Also, we continue to work with the EFF and ACLU to challenge copyright extension activities. You can expect a rigorous challenge, if YACTE (Yet Another Copyright Term Extension) is proposed in Congress (there were 14 extensions during the 20th century!).

• Greg (Project Gutenberg's CEO

While the "Public Domain Dedication" at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/ seems reasonable, I created my own version which you can see at the bottom of my page http://us.metamath.org/symbols/symbols.html . Although I think it is OK as it is, I welcome comments.

I provide the md5 sum of my public domain file archive. While this may seem nitpicky, it allows the work to be identified unambigously, eliminating the possibility of accidentally using a modified version of that file that someone else has copyrighted. This is one of the dangers of public domain - for example, a photograph of a public-domain painting can be copyrighted, even though it may be visually indistinguishable from another one that has been released to public domain.

Also, I explicitly mention some of the things that can be done with a public domain work to educate the reader. I see many misguided pronouncements making things "public domain" with restrictions attached - for example, "public domain as long as you keep any derivative work public domain", "public domain but you must acknowledge me as the author", or "public domain for educational use". These are really copyright licenses, which is fine if that's what the authors want, but they misunderstand the term "public domain".

What is my personal motivation for making something public domain? For me there is a certain kind of satisfaction I get from old books and images with expired copyright, in that I am completely unencumbered to do whatever I wish with them, without any concern about possible consequences of copying, quoting, sharing, building on, or otherwise using the words, images, and ideas contained therein. I don't have to obsess with keeping track of and chasing down credits and permissions for every little piece of every little image that I might use.

Because I like the feeling of this kind of complete freedom, it is my desire that others experience it with respect to certain work of my own. If by my example some other people are encouraged to do the same, that would benefit me.

Public domain can also make things more practical. Since it can be so time-consuming to track down the copyrights for all the images you want to use on a web page, that often it is more efficient just to reinvent the wheel, taking your own photos of the same thing and redrawing your own versions of the same figures. Royalty-free collections can satisfy the need to a certain extent, but you still have to be careful to understand the licensing terms when using them - for example, do they allow your final work, and therefore any of their images contained in it, to be released to public domain if some day you should decide to do so?

In the end, under public domain I accept that someone may "steal" my work and call it their own. But honorable people give credit where credit makes sense, and for me life is too short to give a hoot about the others. So far it has not been a problem; instead, people have thanked me for making it public domain, and that makes me feel good.

Try http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/

--Branko

If anyone who has borrowed a sum of money from Jews dies before
the debt has been repaid, his heir shall pay no interest on the debt
for so long as he remains under age, irrespective of whom he holds his
lands. If such a debt falls into the hands of the Crown, it will take
nothing except the principal sum specified in the bond.