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Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens was basically a demake of the original Star Wars. It's not a shot-for-shot remake, obviously, and it's not a reboot. But it is basically the same fucking story and it's got tons of scenes and settings that are found almost identically in the original.

Hardly surprising. If you look closely enough, most stories are the same. They used to teach the basic plots in grade school English, because the formulas for "good" stories have not really changed since Euripides.

Since there are only seven basic plots to stories the entertainment side would run out of steam quickly.
http://www.ipl.org/div/farq/plotFARQ.html

Imagine this applied to other patents as well, a World of lawyers.

There really aren't that many plots when you boil it down.

Innovation is in the eye of the beholder. Some people see "innovation" merely because they aren't exposed to the predecessors. For instance, Ass-Ass-in's Creed is called "innovative" by people who have no fucking clue what a REAL stealth game - the likes of Deus Ex, or Thief, or even Tenchu - is like.

Likewise, the FPS genre in general has "innovations" from time to time. The latest slew, however, have gone backwards in terms of real gameplay. In the olden days, speed and maneuverability WAS your defense. You had to play agile. Now? It's all about fucking bullshit "grab cover systems" and constantly regenerating shields.

Oh, and to the pokemon kids? Yeah. I have pokemon older than you. No seriously. Get off my lawn, you're stepping on my Bellsprouts.

How is this going to be different than the Internet Public Library? http://www.ipl.org/

Clusty is very good at what they do, but the survey people don't know enough to include it. I also use clusty.com about half of the time. I don't think clusty was a choice, so if they asked me I would have to say Google. Google has a big advantage the default home page (USA download) http://www.google.com/firefox?client=firefox-a&rls =org.mozilla:en-US:official and toolbar for Firefox. If you vary the sites you go to often who cares what website(s) you default to, just make it one you are likely to find useful (on a Windows PC a default page for updates would be good/useful for IE browser). A few years back when I worked as a student in a campus computer lab I usually could point fellow students and others to websites for information they wanted without going to any search engine (used the web enough to know the good websites without having to look them up). Google used to be listed as being in clusty's meta-searches, but now isn't listed in the FAQ.

On Google's side they do come up with lots of results and some of the papers they use in their news section are ones I normally open when I read online papers and gives a pretty good versions of other websites that are the best. It you don't know about the better alternative(s) that already exist for areas Google moves into, like http://www.ipl.org/ or http://www.gutenberg.org/ then when it comes to reading out of copyright books then the Google book project sounds very well meaning and good. Go to Amazon.com to read inside copyright books http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/catalog-guide /guide/-/506469/104-8484589-7689549, before the Google book project they had free excerpts for most books that anyone could view without signing up. If you don't want to find the best and trust Google, then like the Microsoft supporters you we use them except when you need something better and usually Google does a very job. I have toolbar for both Google and Clusty.

Examples of prior art for every plot... http://www.ipl.org/div/farq/plotFARQ.html/ Talks about the theory of there being only one basic plot (CONFLICT!) to 37 basic plots...

It's common stated that there are only a handful of plots in literature, and most books are variations on these themes. Depending upon how broad the patent office chooses to be (and we've seen some doozies from them in the past), this could be disasterous for literature (at least in the US).

Good reference to this concept is here

I don't know if John Locke or any others smoked pot but Thomas Jefferson along with other Founding Fathers grew hemp on thier farms:

Jefferson is credited with several inventions, including the swivel chair, a pedometer, a machine to make fiber from hemp, a letter-copying machine, and the lazy susan.

Cannabis was brought to America during the early colonial period. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both hemp farmers. During the early period of settlement of the New World, everyone owned or used something made of its fibers. Hemp fibers were known as the toughest durable fibers around. Hemp was even used as currency in some cases (Abel, 1982). But, Cannabis is mainly used as an illegal drug in the United States today.

The Monticello Textile Factory
Jefferson's annual goal was 1,200 yards of cloth woven from purchased cotton and wool and hemp produced on his farms. He never sought to make fine cloth; coarse cloth for the summer and winter allotments for the 130 slaves on the Monticello plantation was his only ambition.

Common Sense by Thomas Paine ...
In almost every article of defence we abound. Hemp flourishes even to rankness, so that we need not want cordage...

Ralph Waldo Emerson would be object to be categorized along with Ayn Rand.

Just as there are democrats who disagree with with each other and there are republican who do also not all libertarians agree on everything include Ayn Rand. I don't know much about Rand but some I agree with and others I disagree with. No it's my sister in my family that knows about her and she was very much a Randian. That is until she learned about Objectivism, as a Christian this turned her off. Fact is is that you don't have to be a Randian to be a libertarian.

Ooh here's something I found of John Locke's that mentions hemp:

To the Right Honorable Sir John Sommers
...
And a Swede will no more sell you his Hemp and Pitch, or a Spaniard his Oyl, for less Silver;

And with his sayings, John Locke wouldn't of liked laws outlawing hemp seeing as how he was very much a man of liberty and such a law abridges liberty.

The natural liberty of man is to be free from any superior power on earth, and not to be under the will or legislative authority of man, but to have only the law of nature for his rule.
-- John Locke (1632-1704)

Falcon

Ooh and btw do you know where canvas for painters come from? It got it's name from cannabis. Here's a page listing some of the uses of hemp aka cannabis, Cannabis sativa L.

You may want to start with the Internet Public Library or your public library. (In this case, that's my local public library.)

The Internet Public Library has the largest catalog of peer reviewed journals, they're just currently mixed in with all the others.

The Internet Public Library has a catalog of over 20 000 online, publicly available books and has cataloged a comparable number of online, publicly available magazines and newspapers. Unfortunately, that part of the database is down for a time while the back-end is moved to a new provider. (The old provider stopped on too short notice.)

If you feel you must spend money on e-books, then at least make that a good investment in the form of a donation to Gutenberg, Runeberg, etc. or to EFF or another group to make copyright laws more reasonable once again.

There are 1 to 37 basic plots, but people seem to keep writing. Of course, there are many more books than games, though people make them for many of the same reasons they write. And as the "industry" matures, it will be just as hard to make a classic.

I think everyone confused about the title should go read the following fable: The The Tortoise and the Hare.

You should have been modded up for that old school humor. Jackson was a man's man apparently...get your history lesson for the day here.

there's no evidence that in the 42 months between May 1971 and the time he officially discharged on Nov. 21, 1974, Bush ever took an Air Force physical. His failure to take the physical in 1972, and his subsequent loss of his flying status, should have triggered a disciplinary review, copies of which would be contained in Bush's military file. But none exists. Where are they?

And why, after the government spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach him how to fly, did he apply to be transferred to an Alabama postal unit?

What's that sound? That's the sound of AWOL.

Or for those who enjoy conspiracies, maybe the CP finally did succeed in running a mole to the very top cloaked as a conservative to collapse the country, like they'd been planning in the late 50's early 60's.

there are about seven distinct story outlines.

See here.

Now get back to work!

On that note, the Internet Public Library was created using Mason. Site content is edited by a rotating cadre of library students.

Chongking, the largest city in the world

This city covers more than 31,000 sq.miles / 82,000 sq. km! It would rank between Maine and Indiana if it were a state. It's larger than Ireland.

I don't think it's a real city; a few years ago the Chinese gov't merely decided to call it a
municipality.

Great place for research on a HUGE variety of topics, plus a rather large section devoted to Kids...

The Internet Public Library (www.ipl.org)

For a good site with material for kids try the Internet Public Library, www.ipl.org. It's been going strong for 8 years as of Friday.

The IPL (The Internet Public Library) is a good site as kids start to get a bit older. It is organized much like a public library. The idea is to gather and review information that exists out in the wild and organize it in a way that is useful to individuals who are familiar with "real" libraries.

The content is collected, organized and maintained by actual librarians. There are a handful of reasons why this is in and of itself interesting. The upshot is that the content is organized and a bit more useful to individuals who are not "nerdy" (to use your term) than Google.

More to your actual question, the IPL has links for Fun Stuff that might be a help for you. It has been a while since I poked around in there, so I had not realized they re-designed and added so much new stuff for pre-schoolers (and kids in general).

The IPL (The Internet Public Library) is a good site as kids start to get a bit older. It is organized much like a public library. The idea is to gather and review information that exists out in the wild and organize it in a way that is useful to individuals who are familiar with "real" libraries.

The content is collected, organized and maintained by actual librarians. There are a handful of reasons why this is in and of itself interesting. The upshot is that the content is organized and a bit more useful to individuals who are not "nerdy" (to use your term) than Google.

More to your actual question, the IPL has links for Fun Stuff that might be a help for you. It has been a while since I poked around in there, so I had not realized they re-designed and added so much new stuff for pre-schoolers (and kids in general).

Most libraries have already tackled this topic, and provide at least some annotated links, as well as suggestions for Web directories aimed at children. For a non-local example, try the Internet Public Library's offering. Your local public library probably has something similar, tailored to local interests.

There was an excellent article on this same topic in Discover recently. The possibilities are nice... leaving "personal notes" for your friends at a specific spot in the world. I think the best quote from the article was this one: "When you can stand where others have stood and learn how it affected them, and then share your own impressions in return, public space becomes more deeply public than it was before." It reminds me of a nice book on Native American religious tradition by Vine Deloria, Jr. The idea of bringing technology back to the "primitive" notion of public spaces is appealing to the hippie inside me.

Also of note in the Discover article is a brief introduction to geo-caching. Unrelated, but sounds like fun. :)

--madgeorge

• Projecting back to 1971, Project Gutenberg has tracked Moore's Law quite precisely. January 2003 will be our most productive month ever, and we are looking forward to continuing to double our rate of new eBooks every 18 months.
• Project Gutenberg has received some big donations, and we're working on grants and other funding. However, when you do the math you realize that there's essentially no hope for paying for content -- it takes thousands and thousands of people. The hope for "someone" to do it is naive -- the only answer is to figure out ways for "everyone" to work on digitization.
• While the author makes 6200 books sound like small potatoes, in fact it represents about 1/3 of all eBooks listed in places like the Internet Public Library. Not bad, and it certainly explains why some random book the author wants isn't part of the collection -- there just aren't that many projects working on digitizing literature.
• Where did the author figure on $750million, and for what? Over 30 million printed books were registered for copyright in the last 100 years (this doesn't count magazines, recordings, etc.). The notion that $25/book could pay for digitization is not unreasonable. But where do you get the books, and what about copyright? If there's a plan, I'd like to hear it.
• One more point, to keep this short: We have just under 7000 eBooks (up about 800 from whenever the author did his research!). We have over 1000 active volunteers. The books are in over 20 languages, dozens of formats and, if printed, would fill a small library. We're on track to reach #10,000 in 2003. Via Distributed Proofreading, as mentioned here and in a previous /. story, we can and frequently do complete digitizing a 300 page book in just a few hours. Mr. DeLong, I don't feel apologetic about these numbers at all.

That's all for now. Thanks to all the supportive comments in this thread, and to all the constructive criticism. And remember, a page a day is all it takes to contribute!

Greg Newby, Director and CEO
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
www.gutenberg.net

well... there are several models competing...

The 1 plot, 3 plot, 7, 26, 36... it could go on forever...

check here for a list of different models.

I read an article a long while ago in one of the trade mags that talked about this.

According to the article, software is so bad because it takes legions of software designers/coders to put out the latest version of SoftwareX. The reason it takes legions is that software has become so complex. You used to be able to install Word with a couple of floppy diskettes. Now you need a CD.

Where did the extra 600 Meg come from? Spell Check, grammar checking, clip-art, spread sheet functionality, clip-art creation software, fonts, thesaurus, templates, auto-correct (like spell-check isn't enough?), macros etc, ad infinitum.

Developers spend their time writing new functionality, instead of fixing the broken "slightly-less-than-new-functionality." So, why are they doing this? Simple, because their managers are looking at their artificial time table, and saying "We promised this version would be done by (insert artificially generated date here). We need to get it done yesterday." (Side note here: Apparently, to stay competitive, companies need to release SOMETHING new every 6 months. If they don't, they die. Notice the emphasis on SOMETHING.)

When the development team finishes their newest widget, it heads off to a completely separate team of QA specialists who don't actually understand the interoperability of the new widgets. They miss things. Managers know this but they think, "Well, we can always release a patch later." In really large software companies, this patch is created by an entirely separate team, who had nothing to do with the product's creation in the first place.

Most of the time, the patch team has to consult with the original development team to create the patch. Unfortunately, the original development team isn't available to talk, because they are creating the next great widget for the patch team to fix in 6 mths.

Never mind "Help" files.

It's a complete wonder that we actually get anything that works at all.

So, why do companies do this? Why does Word have clip art creation capabilites? Why does it come packaged with a Thesaurus and a Dictionary, when they are both online, and Webster's Dictionary is the third best selling book of all time (third to the Bible and Quotations from Mao Tse-Tung, which was compulsory reading for all Chinese from 1966 to 1971, Source)?

Simple - you asked for it. Companies have spent hundreds of thousands (dare I say millions?, okay. Millions.) of your dollars on determining what you want. You WANT spell checking. You WANT clip-art creation. You WANT better, faster functionality, and you want it NOW!!!!

That's right, the crappy software is YOUR fault. The &$%@&^'ing OFFICE ASSISTANT is YOUR fault!!

You have nobody to blame but yourselves. Don't you feel ashamed?

BTW: If you don't believe me on this - Our company had over 300 phone calls to our internal IT help desk within a week after moving to Win 2000, because we didn't load Solitare on the computers.

All of the early presidents were born in America, so they were natural born citizens (c.f. - http://www.ipl.org/ref/POTUS/).

I don't know if there was ever any debate about someone born on foreign soil trying to become president in the first 50 years or so, but I suspect that "natural born citizen" would have ruled them out.

Yes, I know this is offtopic.

How about a more practical approach to electronic books? Audio. Audio technologies are quite good and, as shown by the popularity of Napster and Napster-like entities and by the abundance of jukebox software, quite common. Most libraries and many book stores already have audio recordings of books on cassette tape or occasionally on audio CD. These are good for long commutes and road trips. Now that nearly everyone has Ogg/MP3 players, how about books in Ogg?

The bugs in the methodology can be worked out by reading public books. Nice voices can be had by hiring people from the local theater, radio staion or opera more cheaply than the big names like James Earl Jones or (the late) Sam Kinnison.

How about a more practical approach to electronic books? Audio. Audio technologies are quite good and, as shown by the popularity of Napster and Napster-like entities and by the abundance of jukebox software, quite common. Most libraries and many book stores already have audio recordings of books on cassette tape or occasionally on audio CD. These are good for long commutes and road trips. Now that nearly everyone has Ogg/MP3 players, how about books in Ogg?

The bugs in the methodology can be worked out by reading public books. Nice voices can be had by hiring people from the local theater, radio staion or opera more cheaply than the big names like James Earl Jones or (the late) Sam Kinnison.

If you just want to import citations, the Z39.50 search and retrieval protocol is the way to import from yor library catalog and many online databases. Indexdata has number of multiplatform tools that you can use, such as YAZ (a z39.50 client) and PHPYAZ. Three commercial packages import from Z39.50 sources nicely (Bookwhere, Procite and Endnote) both Procite and Endnot work well at managing your footnotes during workprocessing, taking care of numbering and layout (e.g. APA or Chicago Manual of Style, etc.).

If you want something under GPL and more oriented to managing web sites and other Internet resources, then you may want to try hypatia. You'll have to ask special for it, but it's available. Here are the parts I've seen so far:

• Web-based interface, both end users and maintainers.
• Fully multi-lingual, including both interface and content. (It is very easy to add another language to the interfaces. Right now English and Spanish are complete, Norwegian and Finnish are being translated.) Support for Unicode (Which means you're free to add interfaces in or ).
• Useable on many different platforms, including Linux, Unix, and Windows.
• Individual installations can exchange records, allowing federated content and service providers to work together seamlessly. (Haven't tried it yet.)
• Compatible with relevant standards, including MARC, Dublin Core, and the Networked Reference standard currently under development by NISO.
• Special features for digital collections, such as automatic URL checking.
• Authority control over names (e.g. People and Organizations).
• Uses perl/MySQL/javascript

If you just want to import citations, the Z39.50 search and retrieval protocol is the way to import from yor library catalog and many online databases. Indexdata has number of multiplatform tools that you can use, such as YAZ (a z39.50 client) and PHPYAZ. Three commercial packages import from Z39.50 sources nicely (Bookwhere, Procite and Endnote) both Procite and Endnot work well at managing your footnotes during workprocessing, taking care of numbering and layout (e.g. APA or Chicago Manual of Style, etc.).

If you want something under GPL and more oriented to managing web sites and other Internet resources, then you may want to try hypatia. You'll have to ask special for it, but it's available. Here are the parts I've seen so far:

• Web-based interface, both end users and maintainers.
• Fully multi-lingual, including both interface and content. (It is very easy to add another language to the interfaces. Right now English and Spanish are complete, Norwegian and Finnish are being translated.) Support for Unicode (Which means you're free to add interfaces in or ).
• Useable on many different platforms, including Linux, Unix, and Windows.
• Individual installations can exchange records, allowing federated content and service providers to work together seamlessly. (Haven't tried it yet.)
• Compatible with relevant standards, including MARC, Dublin Core, and the Networked Reference standard currently under development by NISO.
• Special features for digital collections, such as automatic URL checking.
• Authority control over names (e.g. People and Organizations).
• Uses perl/MySQL/javascript

If you just want to import citations, the Z39.50 search and retrieval protocol is the way to import from yor library catalog and many online databases. Indexdata has number of multiplatform tools that you can use, such as YAZ (a z39.50 client) and PHPYAZ. Three commercial packages import from Z39.50 sources nicely (Bookwhere, Procite and Endnote) both Procite and Endnot work well at managing your footnotes during workprocessing, taking care of numbering and layout (e.g. APA or Chicago Manual of Style, etc.).

If you want something under GPL and more oriented to managing web sites and other Internet resources, then you may want to try hypatia. You'll have to ask special for it, but it's available. Here are the parts I've seen so far:

• Web-based interface, both end users and maintainers.
• Fully multi-lingual, including both interface and content. (It is very easy to add another language to the interfaces. Right now English and Spanish are complete, Norwegian and Finnish are being translated.) Support for Unicode (Which means you're free to add interfaces in or ).
• Useable on many different platforms, including Linux, Unix, and Windows.
• Individual installations can exchange records, allowing federated content and service providers to work together seamlessly. (Haven't tried it yet.)
• Compatible with relevant standards, including MARC, Dublin Core, and the Networked Reference standard currently under development by NISO.
• Special features for digital collections, such as automatic URL checking.
• Authority control over names (e.g. People and Organizations).
• Uses perl/MySQL/javascript

If you just want to import citations, the Z39.50 search and retrieval protocol is the way to import from yor library catalog and many online databases. Indexdata has number of multiplatform tools that you can use, such as YAZ (a z39.50 client) and PHPYAZ. Three commercial packages import from Z39.50 sources nicely (Bookwhere, Procite and Endnote) both Procite and Endnot work well at managing your footnotes during workprocessing, taking care of numbering and layout (e.g. APA or Chicago Manual of Style, etc.).

If you want something under GPL and more oriented to managing web sites and other Internet resources, then you may want to try hypatia. You'll have to ask special for it, but it's available. Here are the parts I've seen so far:

• Web-based interface, both end users and maintainers.
• Fully multi-lingual, including both interface and content. (It is very easy to add another language to the interfaces. Right now English and Spanish are complete, Norwegian and Finnish are being translated.) Support for Unicode (Which means you're free to add interfaces in or ).
• Useable on many different platforms, including Linux, Unix, and Windows.
• Individual installations can exchange records, allowing federated content and service providers to work together seamlessly. (Haven't tried it yet.)
• Compatible with relevant standards, including MARC, Dublin Core, and the Networked Reference standard currently under development by NISO.
• Special features for digital collections, such as automatic URL checking.
• Authority control over names (e.g. People and Organizations).
• Uses perl/MySQL/javascript

BZZZZZZT!

Nope. Beethoven's Third Symphony (that fat G chord at the beginning) was pretty much the shot that started the romantic era (at least musically). His Ninth was a benchmark symphony for decades, causing many composer's fits in trying to compare theirs to that.

• For free hosting of free-as-in-speech books, see Andamooka. They also allow you to give annotations and comments.
• For a catalog and reviews, see my site, The Assayer.
• Opencontent.org - licenses, and a directory of open-content works
• Internet Public Library
• Project Gutenberg
• ibiblio - an archive of free information
• On-Line Books Page and Book People mailing list - has an emphasis on old books that have fallen into the public domain
• Samizdat.com hosts a bunch of free books, plus lots of good articles and links
• Association des Bibliophiles Universels - hosts PD texts in French

Now, more than ever, it is important for Americans to seek global news sources

Afghan Government http://www.afghan-ie.com/

Also this site has links to middle eastern news sites http://www.ipl.org/cgi-bin/reading/news.out.pl?co= United%20Arab%20Emirates

-rt
======
Now, I think it would be GOOD to buy FIVE or SIX STUDEBAKERS

Here is a list of online books and references which I found useful:

• Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation -- David S. Touretzky
• Successful Lisp: How to Understand and Use Common Lisp -- David B. Lamkins
• CLtL2: Common Lisp the Language, 2nd Edition -- Guy L. Steele
• HyperSpec: The ANSI Standard for Common Lisp -- Kent M. Pitman
• CLOS: Common Lisp Object System -- Daniel G. Bobrow et al
• MOP: The Meta Object Protocol
• CLIM2: Common Lisp Interface Manager 2.0
  The CLIM perspective, user's guide, and specification.

I find that Hogan Books (http://hoganbooks.com/freebook/webbooks.html) lists quite a lot of free books on the Web. The search engine makes it even more useful.

Many of the entries come from InformIT (http://www.informit.com/), which has a pretty good free library.

Then there's the Linux Documentation Project (http://www.linuxdoc.org) for Linux-specific things.

Of course there's also all the other documentation on the Net. Search engines are wonderful.

Not quite computer-related but also worth checking out are Project Gutenberg (http://promo.net/pg/), the Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org/reading/books/index.html) and the UPenn Digital Library (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/lists.html ). Mostly classics and other things whose copyrights have expired, but you have a couple of new books here too. General reading material - bookworm fare. =)

Yes, I know, you were looking for paper copies, and a lot of interesting information isn't available online. But it's worth checking out anyway. =)

I find that Hogan Books (http://hoganbooks.com/freebook/webbooks.html) lists quite a lot of free books on the Web. The search engine makes it even more useful.

Many of the entries come from InformIT (http://www.informit.com/), which has a pretty good free library.

Then there's the Linux Documentation Project (http://www.linuxdoc.org) for Linux-specific things.

Of course there's also all the other documentation on the Net. Search engines are wonderful.

Not quite computer-related but also worth checking out are Project Gutenberg (http://promo.net/pg/), the Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org/reading/books/index.html) and the UPenn Digital Library (http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/lists.html ). Mostly classics and other things whose copyrights have expired, but you have a couple of new books here too. General reading material - bookworm fare. =)

Yes, I know, you were looking for paper copies, and a lot of interesting information isn't available online. But it's worth checking out anyway. =)

Another thing to do if you support this experiment with free (-as-in-beer) information is to write a review of one of these books on The Assayer, which is a nonprofit site I run for user-submitted book reviews with an emphasis on free books. All reviews are copyleft licensed, and the site is noncommercial.

All ten of the Baen books are now listed (so far without reviews) in the site's literature section.

One of the main arguments people have made against free books is that without a publisher, you have no filter in place to get rid of the junk. The Assayer aims to disprove that argument by providing a forum for people to discuss which free books are good and which are bad.

</self-promotion>

By supporting Baen in this experiment, you'll also be helping encourage publishers to take the next step, which is to publish books that are free-as-in-speech, or at least partially free-as-in-speech, e.g. using OPL with the A&B options that prevent other print publishers from selling the same book in print. Until they take that step, there's always the possibility that publishers will make free-as-in-beer books not free again. This has happened with about 30 Macmillan computer science titles. You'll find them all listed on IPL as if they were free, but when you click on the link, you get a message saying they're no longer available for free.

You also have to realize that the publishing industry really doesn't know how this is going to play out. They'll try stuff and see if it works. They'll try antibooks. They'll try lame stuff like putting books online, but only with every single page as a bitmap, so that it's completely impractical to read them. (iUniverse, Dorling Kindersley, and Electric Press do this.)

The Assayer - free-information book reviews

As the author of a free book, worries about this kind of abuse are one of the most common reactions I get when I talk to people who aren't familiar with free information. The crucial point is that the internet is the perfect tool for publicizing free information projects and giving people a place to check whether the thing they're paying for might really be available for free. In the case of books, people should know to check the IPL, On-Line Books Page, Andamooka, and the site immodestly listed in my sig. I'm not as familiar with the equivalents for software, but I imagine SourceForge would be a good starting point.

Doh! I screwed up big time! That link is to an alternate history fiction (what if the South had won the Civil War, I think).

Here is the List of US Presidents

So, no, there was not a President Hancock (or Handcock).

Sorry for the previous disinformation. :(
-----
D. Fischer

Scientific test:

1. Go to http://ebooks.barnesandnoble.com and select "American Literature" from the free books in the left panel.
2. Download one of the free eBooks, let's say "The Big Town" by Ring Lardner.
3. Note that you don't have to activate your Microsoft Reader or Microsoft Wallet if you just want one of these free books--but you do need to download Microsoft Reader, so you must use it only on a Microsoft Windows machine.
4. Now visit the Eldritch Press site and download the same book in HTML form, http://www.eldritchpress.org/rl/bigtown.html --(note that the text and illustrations were produced by "circumventing" the Microsoft encryption scheme, demonstrating that it cannot work).
5. If you like, download the TrueType fonts Berling and Berling Italic.
6. Read the two books on your favorite computer and display.
7. Observe that the open book was actually proofread and errors corrected.
8. Help me make a table that compares the two, pro and con, feature by feature.

OPEN:

1. Blind readers can "read" it with text-to-speech synthesizers or Braille printers.
2. Reader can copy it and share it with a friend.
3. Since it's on one web page, searching and copying text is easy.
4. Text can be piped into another Unix-type program for word count, glossary, index, concordance, dictionary etymology or corpus, reformat for another computer program, computer translation aids, and whatever you can think of.
5. Cascading style sheets in HTML code make it easy to create a better layout, typography, or style.
6. It's possible to link to other works on the web such as other Ring Lardner stories or sites such as Eldritch Press's Lardner site.
7. ....what else?

CLOSED:

1. Works only on Microsoft Windows.
2. Have to have a credit card for Microsoft Passport
3. Locks book against blind readers
4. Proprietary user interface goes against all World Wide Web and Microsoft standards
5. Reader reveals private demographic information to publisher
6. Used bookstores go out of business if this technology widely adopted.
7. Encryption prevents fair use of a work in the public domain--not available to be cited in a student's paper, anthologized in a teacher's course book, and so on.
8. ....what else?

9. Note that I refuse to share any circumvention methods with others. I believe the DMCA makes such sharing illegal--at least until we can get that law overturned. However, the DMCA has been interpreted by Judge Kaplan in SDNY to mean that if you can figure out a way to circumvent, then you can do so in order to make fair use of the encrypted work.

   The reason I'm giving this information now is to warn authors not to believe what their publishers are telling them: that they should not publish online unless works are locked up in a format such as Microsoft Reader. Everybody should know now that there is no valid technology to prevent digital works from being read, shared, or copied. In fact, if it were possible, our civilization, built upon the open, real book, would be in danger of collapsing.

   But you knew that already, didn't you? After all, I pointed this out two years ago, in the 1998 interview with myself, Battle of the Books. But at the time, too many gadget freaks were willing to swallow Microsoft's line that the display technology was key to getting people to read books online. Okay, now that you've done the experiment, browse through the other 12,000 free online books NOT in Microsoft Reader format: The On-Line Books Page or Internet Public Library, just for the English-language ones. After all, you own them!

I'm posting this here because I think there are many on the open source community that don't realize the immense harm that would come to distributed control of IP if patents are abolished or weakened. If that happens, the guys with the most money win by default, since the smaller guys will have no protections whatever.

The following is a letter I wrote to LWN a few weeks ago outlining part of my argument. It will rub a lot of people the wrong way, but we can't afford to destroy the patent system unless we really want Microsoft and other huge companies to call all the shots. I don't think a lot of people here have thought these issues through.

Letter to LWN (at http://www.lwn.net/2000/0420/backpage.pht ml)

I've gotten several challenges to my assertion about patents as a desirable thing
(mostly asking for examples of small inventors that actually did profit from
patents) so here's my quick response, FWIW:

Anyone saying patents don't do immense public good, and provide worthwhile,
needed, and *effective* protection of small inventors against large corporations
is simply ignorant of the history of even quite recent technology. Many
inventors started small, but because of patent protection were indeed able to
profit greatly from their inventions.

From the "gararge-shop" POV, well, just off the top of my head, there are the
examples everyone is familiar with: Bill Hewlett and David Packard (HP,
instruments), Steves Jobs and Wozniak (Apple, home computer), and outside the
computer industry, folks like Edwin Land (Polaroid, polarized materials and
instant camera), Chester Carlson (Xerox, xerography), Henry Ford (Ford,
affordable automobiles), Thomas Edison (GE, light bulb, motion pictures,
phonograph...), and Alexander Graham Bell (AT&T, telephone), all of whom
profited greatly from their patented works. (One could argue for the inclusion
of Jeff Bezos in that list, although around here, that's a bit like whacking a
hornet's nest with a stick...)

But the classic twentieth century example of patents providing exactly the kind
of protection I'm talking about is probably that of Philo T. Farnsworth, whom
you may never have heard of, although you likely use his invention (electronic
television) every day. Farnsworth was the prototypical individualist inventor
who persevered against all odds and eventually defeated David Sarnoff and
Vladimir Zworykin of the immensly powerful RCA. RCA was truly the Microsoft of
its day in terms of control of the market and underlying technologies through
acquisition - often under severe economic and other pressure. RCA had a policy
of never paying royalties for any technology - a policy they managed to uphold
until they met Philo Farnsworth, who just wouldn't give up.

Farnsworth fought virtually alone against all of RCA's power for seven years
before the final court rulings that his patents had clear validity and
precedence over Zworykin's, forcing a tearful RCA lawyer to sign a royalty
payment agreement to Farnsworth. (Farnsworth publicly displayed television
*five years* before Sarnoff unveiled RCA's infringing version to the world
amidst great fanfare at the 1939 World's Fair, leading many to believe Sarnoff
and RCA were the inventors of television - sound like anyone today?)

Farnsworth's experience is, if anything, a case study for the need to
*strengthen* patents and either streamline patent appeals or extend the length
of patents when thier commercial utility is impacted by unsuccessful challenges.
(World War II intervened, and the government outlawed television for the
duration of the war (the technology was needed for radar, night vision and other
inventions Farnsworth then worked on), and so Farnsworth's patents expired
before he could profit from them.

Do you still think patents are a bad idea? I'd argue experience shows that
patents should be strengthened and perhaps that the duration of Farnsworth's
patent should have been extended, due to RCA's clear abuse of the patent system
and the courts. (I also think the government should have been upright enough to
grant extensions in the name of fair play to all inventors whose inventions were
commandeered for the war effort, but that's another issue entirely.)

History clearly shows that often patents are all that stands between real
progress and innovation and the acquisition by force so typical of a Sarnoff or
Gates. Strong patent law is the *only* effective defense against large
companies stealing technology from small inventors. (What RCA tried to do could
be accurately portrayed as theft.) I'm amazed more people don't get this, but
they tend to avoid history, and fail to recognize that our American forefathers
were wiser than we are in pretty much every way.

Although it's not perfect, there are very good reasons the patent system is the
way it is, and we meddle with it at our peril. It would be nice to see a
balanced discussion of this issue rather than the knee-jerk reactions that are
more common in the open source/free software community.

Dub

P.S.: I recommend spending some time browsing through some of the links below
to see how many of the great inventors of recent history were independent - the
protection provided by the patent system allowed them to develop and in many
cases profit handsomely from their inventions. You might be surprised at the
diversity and "ordinariness" of many of these inventors of important
breakthroughs - they're not such an elite group as you might imagine (the list
is somewhat US-centric - our culture celebrates invention, and so links for US
inventors are much easier to find):

National Inventor's Hall of Fame
MIT's Invention Dimension Archive
Good Internet Public Library list of links to Inventor information

Local Papers are commonly biased in their reporting. Online papers are too. The advantage with online papers is that you can either find one that matches your bias or compare and contrast in an effort to find the truth. Papers from a foreign country are extremely important, as they'll allow you a perspective on your own country that is impossible to get from non-imported print media.

The process of printing means the news is old (by modern standards) by the time I read it. Why would I want to read old news? (Or as Wired put it a few years ago, "Wired is Tired.")

I live in Omaha. The paper used to be close to useless due to biased content, however they have adapted nicely. I can search and find news articles and, more importantly, search the classifieds. The last one makes my ad much more valuable and it makes looking for an item or a job much easier. If I want an exercise bike, I can search a few weeks of newspapers quickly and easily.

I'll read the newsmagazines (such as Time and Newsweek) when someone can convince me they've started to put out issues without faked photos and with accurate content. The last few times I looked at one they were covering Columbine and the Seattle W.T.O. events. The bias and partial coverage of the events in their reporting made the article worthless.

If print news wants to compete with online news they must base themselves off of the two advantages they have over the online community. Those advantages are portability and locality. This means that they need to quit paying for news feeds (a.p., etc.), improve local editorials and news articles, and decrease the size and cost of the paper. In addition, an online mirror (as described above) has its uses, especially for classifieds. Finally, there are services a paper can do well that the internet doesn't. Comics, crosswords, and Advice columns (bathroom reading) are still better in papers than online. Expand your comics/crossword section. Cover local sports and local politics heavily. Contain content aimed at your entire community. Contain editorials that are controversial.

Newspapers have long held an effective monopoly in many areas. They have grown weak and really are not good at dealing with competition. Some papers are wonderful, but many are utter drek.

Realize that many local news teams have used humor to stay sucessful. Consider it.

News is news. It is a list of the facts regarding a situation. They should not contain opinions. Editorials are editorials. They are opinions that contain news as a basis for the opinions. John Katz writes editorials that use news as support. (good). Taco writes news that contains editorials (bad). If newspapers could learn to remove bias and sensationalism from their reporting they would do a lot better. (And if they think we don't see it then their only blinding themselves.)

A friend of mine has gone out on a camera crew with the Daily Show. The method is simple. Interview someone for 2 to three hours and throw in a really oddball question after the first hour or so and every half hour after that. The person doesn't realize that the whole purpose of the interview is the few odd questions so they do their best to answer them and end up looking like an idiot. What's sad is that it seems that the real news does much the same thing. They blow rolls of film, including a number of staged shots for many articles. As a result, we've grown used to it and it has ceased to have an impact on us. Papers do it. We know they do it. We've seen them do it. Therefore we cease to trust them. Why would I pay to read news I don't trust?

-----

Here's a story about how the Right to Keep and Bear Arms played a part in protecting the lives of citizens in the face of persecution from mob mentality and a complicit local government. It happened in the city where I go to work every day, and it happened less than forty years ago. It's hard to tell, but this article might have been written by a communist or communist-sympathizer, so it should be read with that bias in mind.

Here's another story about how the Right to Keep and Bear Arms prevented another local government (this time in Tennessee) from rigging elections in 1946.

As for the national government, the greatest effect of the 2nd Amendment is hard to judge, as the would-be tyrants are hardly going to inform us of the occasions when they wanted to destroy civil liberties but were too afraid to do so. Certainly, however, it has had some effects. Apparently in the wake of Oklahoma City, the FBI has been more willing to try to negotiate, and find common ground with, various groups that they had previously labelled extremist -- and were surprised to find that they often shared very similar values.

Although not in the United States, it is probably telling that the Afrikaaners in South Africa treated the Zulus (who were willing and able to fight) much differently than the other tribes (who were generally peaceful), and if you read Dr. Livingstone's "Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa", you will discover that those Tswana who learned to resist the Boers were able to maintain more of their freedom than when they had tried to co-exist peacefully. (Search for this book at http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books or http://www.ipl.org.

The Spanish and Portuguese colonists both were happy enough to conduct slave raids on the Guarani Indians, until the Jesuits got permission to arm them -- at which point the slave raids miraculously abated. (Read the famous socialist/communist author Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham's book, "A Vanished Arcadia: The Jesuits in Paraguay", also online at the above addresses, for an account. Cunninghame Graham is a two-part last name, which will help when you try to search for it.)

The lessons of history are plain and clear, and we ignore them at our peril.

As George Washington expressed it, "If you wish for peace, prepare for war." It is as true now as it was then.

Alan Light

You are wrong. PG lists a little over 2,000 books. The On-Line Books Page has links to more than 10,000 in English alone. Therefore you are wrong in saying the OLBP "credits Project Gutenberg for most of it's information."

Instead of calling PG "organized" and "extensive," you might say it is random and shallow. The OLBP and http://www.ipl.org list books by Dewey categories and subject, while PG does not. PG is shallow because it refuses to put the necessary bibliographic information on texts--one can't even find out which year or which edition most of them are.

Because PG uses only ASCII files downloaded by FTP or gopher, it has not yet joined the World Wide Web. It is not possible to make a deep link to a paragraph or page inside a PG book, for example if one wishes to reference a quotation. It is intended for offline reading only, and in that respect it offers nothing over a paperback book. Instead, other online book projects deliberately produce works that take advantage of computer power, for example by using more readable fonts.

As far as PG being the "premier" group doing online texts, that smells of a little old American prejudice. Since they use only ASCII, they can't include accented characters for other languages. They have started to include a few works in European languages, with strange conventions to represent those characters, but it will be interesting to see how PG adapts to Unicode and the extension of the World Wide Web to non-English-speaking nations.

A more significant beef about PG is that it is centralized and dominated by one person, who does not share the philosophy of Open Source production that most of us do. Instead of forcing individuals to contribute to this project, why not help them set up their own web sites to publish their own works, or other works they have scanned? The WWW has made this type of centralized project unnecessary and even harmful. That is what we ought to be discussing here, not how to send money to this project to bail it out once again.

I am not afraid to belittle Project Gutenberg. I sign my name, too!