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Domain: theassayer.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to theassayer.org.
Comments · 225
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open-source science textbooks
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a lot more free-as-in-speech booksI should note that it was well worth it to spend the time on the GNU FDL. It has gained adoption, as print publishers are discovering that there is a way to license their books that gives freedom and is profitable. For the first time, we can begin recommending that GNU users buy some books released by the commercial publishers. It's a very short list, but it is growing. (You can see this list on our website).
Their list of free-as-in-speech books is pretty short. A much bigger catalog is here
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reviews, anyone?
Could I entice anyone to review it here on The Assayer?
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reviews, anyone?
Could I entice anyone to review it here on The Assayer?
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shameless self-promotionOK, warning, this is shameless self-promotion... I run a web site for user-submitted book reviews, with an emphasis on free books. The catalog currently has over 200 books in it that were intentionally made free by their authors. Of course there are scads of computer books, but there's also such cool stuff as a book on trick roping (i.e. lasso stuff), as well as, admittedly, a lot of crank literature
Online publishing is only dead if you're a publisher.
Well, the really interesting question isn't whether online publishing is dead, it's whether the publishing business in general will be recognizable in 20 years.Publishers will probably continue to fill some useful functions. For example, some people have wonderful thoughts to express, but their grammar and spelling are horrible; they're still going to need copy editors.
On the other hand, print encyclopedias for home use are pretty much dead already, and academic journals are probably going to go electronic-only within the next generation.
The really huge change would be if print-to-order ever became really viable. So far it seems to be mostly vaporware, or too uneconomical for the author and/or reader. The biggest single remaining justification for the traditional publishing model is that the setup costs for publishing an edition of a book are very high, so you need lots of professional filtering and editing before you make the investment.
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free booksBasalisk's question is a little contradictory, because it asks for books that a library would want on its "shelves," but also asks for advice on making a collection that won't become obsolete quickly (will have a "long shelf life"). In other words, the assumption is that the books will be in dead tree format, and that dead tree format will not become obsolete for a long time. Computer books are the one big category of books where free information is making inroads, and where digital books are rapidly replacing dead-tree books. (Notice how software these days always seems to come with PDF documentation rather than a printed, bound manual?)
Some of the books that people have already mentioned in their posts are actually available as free information. Examples: Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (suggested by the post I'm replying to), and Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel. For a listing of a bunch of free-information computer science books, look here.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
free booksBasalisk's question is a little contradictory, because it asks for books that a library would want on its "shelves," but also asks for advice on making a collection that won't become obsolete quickly (will have a "long shelf life"). In other words, the assumption is that the books will be in dead tree format, and that dead tree format will not become obsolete for a long time. Computer books are the one big category of books where free information is making inroads, and where digital books are rapidly replacing dead-tree books. (Notice how software these days always seems to come with PDF documentation rather than a printed, bound manual?)
Some of the books that people have already mentioned in their posts are actually available as free information. Examples: Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing (suggested by the post I'm replying to), and Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel. For a listing of a bunch of free-information computer science books, look here.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
198 free books
Here is a list of 198 free books. These are all books whose authors have intentionally made them free as in beer or as in speech.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
198 free books
Here is a list of 198 free books. These are all books whose authors have intentionally made them free as in beer or as in speech.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Re:Uses for this machine
The ability to be able to check out and access the entire book is vital for me when I want to consider which book to buy.
One of the best applications of this machine would be for books that are out of copyright, or whose authors have intentionally made them free as in beer (examples). In that case, you can have your cake and eat it too: check out the book for free on the CRT, and then if you like it, get a bound copy printed up.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Re:Uses for this machine
The ability to be able to check out and access the entire book is vital for me when I want to consider which book to buy.
One of the best applications of this machine would be for books that are out of copyright, or whose authors have intentionally made them free as in beer (examples). In that case, you can have your cake and eat it too: check out the book for free on the CRT, and then if you like it, get a bound copy printed up.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
publisher as gatekeepermost readers are accustomed to having publishers act as the gatekeepers, the arbiters of quality--if something has been pro-published, they know that it's more likely to be worth reading.
You're oversimplifying here. First off, a lot of dreck gets published professionally: books about pyramid power and astrology, for example.Also, there's no fundamental reason why the organization that judges the quality of the book has to be the same one that distributes it. Currently there's only an economic reason for this coupling of the two roles, since traditional printing has huge setup costs.
What about publishing free-information books? The traditional publishing system makes it unlikely that many publishers will make the investment to print an edition of a book without being guaranteed a monopoly via copyright. Yes, O'Reilly publishes free-information books, but the rest of the industry isn't exactly rushing to follow.
Warning: shameless self-promotion coming up! The Assayer is a site I run for user-contributed book reviews, with an emphasis on reviews of free books. The aim is to get the best of both worlds: free information, but with a mechanism to keep from drowning in all the low-quality stuff.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
publisher as gatekeepermost readers are accustomed to having publishers act as the gatekeepers, the arbiters of quality--if something has been pro-published, they know that it's more likely to be worth reading.
You're oversimplifying here. First off, a lot of dreck gets published professionally: books about pyramid power and astrology, for example.Also, there's no fundamental reason why the organization that judges the quality of the book has to be the same one that distributes it. Currently there's only an economic reason for this coupling of the two roles, since traditional printing has huge setup costs.
What about publishing free-information books? The traditional publishing system makes it unlikely that many publishers will make the investment to print an edition of a book without being guaranteed a monopoly via copyright. Yes, O'Reilly publishes free-information books, but the rest of the industry isn't exactly rushing to follow.
Warning: shameless self-promotion coming up! The Assayer is a site I run for user-contributed book reviews, with an emphasis on reviews of free books. The aim is to get the best of both worlds: free information, but with a mechanism to keep from drowning in all the low-quality stuff.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
reviews
If anybody who's read Programming Ruby would like to review it on The Assayer, it would be greatly appreciated. Review it here.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
reviews
If anybody who's read Programming Ruby would like to review it on The Assayer, it would be greatly appreciated. Review it here.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Read the article.The article says the same thing about many kinds of books. However, it also discusses certain categories of books for which the electronic form is very successful, such as electronic encyclopedias, which have mostly replaced print encyclopedias. It also talks about electronic self-publishing, which is a lot easier to do than print self-publishing.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Re:A place to start on free text books.QUESTION:
STALLMAN: No, I don't.
That was really bizarre. There are tons of free textbooks on the web. Check out The Assayer and Andamooka as starting places. It's particularly strange that Stallman would say this, since he's a computer scientist, and computer textbooks (and manuals) are the biggest single category of free books.
Continuing on the same topic, Stallman says
I started proposing this free encyclopedia and learning resource a couple of years ago, and I thought it would probably take a decade to get things rolling. Now we already have an encyclopedia that is rolling.
The most charitable way to describe this statement is that Stallman must have a horrible memory. As discussed ad nauseum on Slashdot a few months ago, Nupedia came first, then Stallman contacted them, then they agreed to GFDL it, then Stallman went ahead and tried to muscle his way in anyway with the confusingly named "Gnupedia."
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Re:A place to start on free text books.QUESTION:
STALLMAN: No, I don't.
That was really bizarre. There are tons of free textbooks on the web. Check out The Assayer and Andamooka as starting places. It's particularly strange that Stallman would say this, since he's a computer scientist, and computer textbooks (and manuals) are the biggest single category of free books.
Continuing on the same topic, Stallman says
I started proposing this free encyclopedia and learning resource a couple of years ago, and I thought it would probably take a decade to get things rolling. Now we already have an encyclopedia that is rolling.
The most charitable way to describe this statement is that Stallman must have a horrible memory. As discussed ad nauseum on Slashdot a few months ago, Nupedia came first, then Stallman contacted them, then they agreed to GFDL it, then Stallman went ahead and tried to muscle his way in anyway with the confusingly named "Gnupedia."
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Re:How much powerThe pressure is on the order of a hundred atmospheres, so the issue of vacuum versus 1 atmosphere is a 1% effect. I think a bigger issue is the details of how the compression is carried out, and whether this results in a lot of loss of a lot of heat energy into the rock.
Efficiency is a separate issue, and you're right, it's not going to be 100%. However, it's not a heat engine, so there's not a thermodynamic limit on its efficiency like there would be for a natural-gas-fueled turbine or something like that.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Re:TransferOf course, if it was so lucrative, you'd have to wonder why the company went out of business. Why not just fire all your staff and sit back and collect the subscription fees?
Some more likely scenarios:
- You're using old software that you think is great, but nobody else is using it anymore. It's not lucrative for the publisher. The go out of business, and you're out of luck.
- In preparation for going out of business, the publisher offers to sell you a new version of the software that doesn't have subscription enforcement. In other words, they offer to convert you from rental to ownership, and if you don't like the price they offer for ownership, you're screwed (or you can pirate it). Note that this gets rid of the problem of designing nonterminating keys into the software.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
older than thatActually it's nearly 20 years old. Muller wrote a book about it. When I took physics from him at Berkeley ca. 1983, he was talking like it would get found in a survey fairly soon. It's also hard to know how much faith to put in the supposed periodicities of the mass extinctions -- it depends on stuff like which dates you decide are reliable enough to include in the analysis.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
I'm just not sure...
...what area of my body I'd want the monkey head transplanted onto.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
digital-analog-digitalFor people who really want to trade copyrighted MP3's and videos, I don't see what the problem is. Why not just play it, take the analog output, and redigitize it? You then have a digital version that can be copied ad infinitum. For audio, it seems like such a trivial hardware hack, you could probably do it without even breaking out the soldering gun. Only a little less trivial for video.
Then again, I think it's a pretty sad commentary on the free information movement if all everyone wants to focus on is taking information instead of making some. The reason you've heard of Linus Torvalds isn't because he cracked the copy protection on a proprietary Unix. Sure, it's loathsome to have this kind of copy protection shoved down your throat the next time you buy a computer, but I'd rather see a vibrant, independent culture based on free information than a parasitic one that just whines a lot and sponges off of the big-business media.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Re:MacOS XIf anything, I thought the article was not critical enough of the serious problems with X. The two things that made it useless to me were
- Printing doesn't work, even though it apparently does have a driver for my printer (Epson Stylus Color 800).
- Classic crashes way too much for me to trust it when I'm trying to get my work done. I don't have any choice but to use Classic apps, since there's basically zip out there as far as carbonized/cocoa apps (and I'm not thrilled about the prospect of paying money for X versions eventually, either).
I've been using macs since ca. 1984, and this is the only OS release I ever installed that's been completely useless for doing real-life work.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Re:Parallel evolutionWell, we know nothing about possible multicellular life on other planets, but we know that many of the most intelligent forms of life here on earth have not done the kind of parallel evolution you're referring to. Dolphins and whales don't have "two or more manipulator arms," nor do elephants. Actually some of the most neurologically sophisticated life forms on earth are cephalopod mollusks, e.g. squids and octopi.
ears make sense to be placed on the sides of the head
Fish have internal ears. Mollusks's sense of hearing is not well understood, but is basically is nothing like ours.a nose makes sense to be located above the mouth
Goverments, echonomy, wars, art, etc. would be expected in a society of social intelligent animals.
I haven't seen any evidence that dolphins, whales, elephants, chimps, squids, or octopi have anything like these. What would a dolphin care for international boundaries? Why would a solitary-living whale species invent government?
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
nothing in commonThe question sort of assumes that the aliens are our peers, like in the Star Trek universe where most of the aliens are humanoid, and are at a level of technological development similar to ours. Under that assumption, I guess it makes sense to worry about whether they can own property, vote on juries, blah blah blah.
But first off, they're not likely to be interested in juries and real estate. Look at our own planet. We can't even be sure whether dolphins, whales, and elephants are intelligent. Darn, I hate how the dolphins just refuse to use the #2 pencil properly in order to take an IQ test!
Also, the universe is billions of years old, and the evolution of intelligence is likely to happen at vastly different points in time. Any aliens who land on earth are likely to be hundreds of millions of years more advanced than us, so it won't really matter to them what our laws say.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Re:Directories are not search enginesAs far as I can tell, there's no oversight or "meta editors" and they are sorely needed.
You're wrong. There are metaeditors, and they have quite a bit of power. They can delete entire categories, for example.
I know that many of the active editors are people pimping their own sites and ignoring submissions.
Listing your own site is OK, even encouraged -- having a site in the category is considered a sign that you know something about it. Keep in mind that just getting listed on DMOZ isn't supposed to be hard; it's not like Yahoo, which makes more of a point of being selective.
Listing your own site as a "cool" site is not OK -- if you know of such a case, you should complain to the editor of the more general category of which it's a subcat. Keep complaining up the tree until you hear back.
Actually, you hear a lot of people whine about how their applications to become editors got turned down, but the people at DMOZ who review the applications say that by far the most common reason is that the person's application makes it clear they're only interested in self-promotion. So yes, people do try to abuse it, but DMOZ tries to stop it from happening, takes complaints seriously, and is in fact getting criticized all the time for taking it too seriously.
Open Directory sucks. I work for a fairly large international B2B company and not only is our company not listed, neither are several of our competitors. I eagerly await the day that AOL stops using so I can stop caring what Open Directory does.
Maybe you'd have more luck getting listed if you'd learn more about how Open Directory works.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Re:Directories are not search enginesYahoo and the like are doomed to failure until someone implements something like the Dewey Decimal System for web pages and then convinces a large number of webmasters to correctly classify their pages using it. That way a machine can do the hard work and only the person designing the page need do the actual work of making sure the page is classified correctly.
Well, what you're describing sounds a lot like META KEYWORD tags.
Having been an Open Directory editor in the past, I don't really think the problem is finding the right pages. Actually the biggest problem is just that a lot of editors aren't active, and it's hard to know who's active, because they're listed as editors even if they haven't logged in or checked submissions for a year. This creates problems for editors who have to cooperate with other editors, and may also give outsiders the impression that Open Directory is overwhelmed in general, when really it's just that the editor they submitted to is AWOL.
Yahoo is doomed to failure because they don't have enough people working for them. Open Directory works just fine, because they have orders of magnitude more eyeballs working in parallel. No, Open Directory doesn't list every page on the web, and that's just fine with me as a user -- it's more useful because it's selective.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
When's my laptop gonna run for free?
There's something that makes me feel just a little uncomfortable, somehow, about having a box in my lap full of liquids at cryogenic temperatures.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
review, pleaseIt looks like most of the posts so far claiming to have read it are really jokes. But if someone on Slashdot actually has read it, it would be great if they could review it on The Assayer.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
review, pleaseIt looks like most of the posts so far claiming to have read it are really jokes. But if someone on Slashdot actually has read it, it would be great if they could review it on The Assayer.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
free as in...?Raymond deserves praise for making the fruits of his labor free as in beer. But it seems a bit odd that, although he's soliciting contributions from other people as co-authors, the book is apparently not free as in speech. At least, I couldn't find a GFDL or OPL license anywhere. So here's the guy who wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and yet he doesn't think copylefting is the right basis for a free-information collaboration?? It's not as though copylefting is any obstacle to print publishing these days. O'Reilly has published a lot of copylefted stuff, as have other publishers.
BTW, it would be cool if any Slashdotters wanted to review Raymond's books on The Assayer.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
free as in...?Raymond deserves praise for making the fruits of his labor free as in beer. But it seems a bit odd that, although he's soliciting contributions from other people as co-authors, the book is apparently not free as in speech. At least, I couldn't find a GFDL or OPL license anywhere. So here's the guy who wrote The Cathedral and the Bazaar, and yet he doesn't think copylefting is the right basis for a free-information collaboration?? It's not as though copylefting is any obstacle to print publishing these days. O'Reilly has published a lot of copylefted stuff, as have other publishers.
BTW, it would be cool if any Slashdotters wanted to review Raymond's books on The Assayer.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Maybe I can find out......who keeps taking my pens at work.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Re:I agree with the ruling, but not the law...I offered some suggestions recently on Half-Empty for realistic political goals for copyright reform. It's not going to be easy, though. There are some major corporate economic interests involved, and the whole reason copyright gets more and more out of balance is that they're so good at lobbying. The Bono act was passed without any debate on the floor -- legend has it that the CEO of Disney got a private meeting with Clinton, and explained what a disaster it would be if the 1923 Winnie the Pooh copyrights went public domain.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Red Hat releases Cat 2007Red Hat, Inc. today announced the release of Cat 2007. Said spokesman Fred Smith, "This isn't your grandparents' Cat." Cat is no longer just a program that copies stdin to stdout, said Smith. "The new Cat 2007 comes with all the features users have been asking for, like an animated character who pops up and offers advice if you seem uncertain." Other features of the new Cat include:
- prevents the copying of text files that carry copyright notices
- automatically translates natural-language text files to and from English, French, German, Finnish, Serbian, Mayan hieroglyphs, and Klingon
- interfaces to e-mail, FTP, palmtop computers, hearing aids, and coffeepots
- For users who don't understand the philosophy of the Unix CLI, Cat now incorporates the functionality of over 120 other Unix commands, such as Grep 2006 and More 2005.
- For users who are used to inaccurate Windows progress bars, Cat 2007 features a special nonlinear mapping that makes the bar go almost completely across, and then crawl the last 5% of the way very slowly while little animated pictures of pieces of paper fly across the screen.
Red Hat's stock rose 37 cents on the news of the new product.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
modularity and consistencyThe strongest advantage of the Unix CLI is modularity: little utilities that do a specific thing, and can be piped together. The more bells and whistles you add onto these utilities, the more it violates this philosophy, and the more likely it becomes that side-effects will keep them from playing nicely together.
The biggest advantage of a Mac-style GUI is consistency: every program has a File menu with similar commands, and so on. Interfacing it somehow to a CLI would just make it more complicated and less consistent.
I like the fact that the GUI and the CLI are completely separate in MacOS X, for example. It keeps everything conceptually simple. And you'd better believe that the average Mac user is completely uninterested in the CLI -- that's why Apple has made it so clear that they don't want software developers ever to assume users will use the CLI.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
economics and choiceI agree with you that it's simplistic just to say we need legislation, but "Live with it and quit whining?" That seems like an oversimplification too.
There are obviously some legal problems with forbidding web sites from collecting data that users voluntarily give them. Slashdot has my e-mail address, which I gave them voluntarily. The only difference between them and Amazon.com is that I personally consider Slashdot to be more trustworthy. I don't see how legislation could allow me to give my info to Slashdot, but protect me against Amazon's stated willingness to sell my information if they go bankrupt or are acquired. I just made a mistake by sharing my information with Amazon. I should have read their privacy policy and stayed away.
But leaving it up to personal choice isn't the whole solution. For instance, every supermarket in my area has a program where they keep track of what you buy. If you don't participate in the program, they charge you higher prices. Here there's a problem with lack of choice.
Another issue is that often you don't know what information is being collected about you. For example, there are the infamous "web bugs," invisible 1x1 images that tell somebody what pages you've been surfing or whether you opened their spam. This issue is exactly what The Trial is about. Again, there's no real choice for most people. I'm among the tiny percentage of the population that's sophisticated enough to turn off images and html in my e-mail program, but I haven't bothered looking into ways to avoid hitting web bugs inadvertently when I websurf. And most people simply don't have the time or expertise to keep up to date with how to protect themselves against this kind of stuff.
Legislation might be part of the solution. A more important part of the solution might be create an internet infrastructure that is technologically privacy-friendly. An example of this is the way browsers let you look at cookies and reject them if you want to; not a very successful example, but this is the kind of thing that needs to be worked on. Another thing is that there are still many web sites out there that ask for your personal information, but don't have any posted privacy policy -- we should all exert pressure on them to improve their practices.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Think outside the boxLet's think outside the box a little. In terms of software, how credible do you think the free information movement would be if we had all the rhetoric without any concrete accomplishments like Linux, gcc, GIMP, etc.? Because the free information movement has accomplished these things in the area of software, we can use these examples to try to influence politicians to take free information seriously, and not to buy the Microsoft line wholesale.
Where are the corresponding accomplishments of free information in the area of music? Mutopia is great, but its contents were all public domain already. If you look in the relevant dmoz category, there is virtually no music that has been intentionally made into copylefted free information by the composer.
As long as free software could be successfully portrayed as a synonym for warez, it was hard to make any political progress. Same goes for music. As long as the free music scene on the internet consists of nothing but downloading MP3s illegally, it's going to be very hard to accomplish anything against the overreaching of the copyright holders.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Re:Curious.But the calculations of the cloud of virtual particles that surround the muon are insanely difficult. I'm curious if perhaps an error may lie in wait. Appearently, their paper was only submitted to Phys. Rev. Letters Febuary 8th
The paper is here. If you check the references, the theoretical calculation (done by someone else) dates back to 1999. This kind of calculation was first done in the 1950's, so I think it's pretty well understood. They give a range of uncertainty on the theoretical value, and it's not significant compared to the statistical error bars in the experiment.Tau would have produced a more measurable result (I assume), but crunching the numbers on it might be a nightmare
In the paper, they say that the effect scales as the square of the mass, so yes, the tau would have produced a bigger effect. I'd guess the reason they didn't use taus is simply that their accelerator didn't have enough energy to produce taus. I don't see why "crunching the numbers" would be an issue. If you have a computer program set up to calculate the g-2 of the electron or muon, then I think all you should really have to do is change one variable to calculate g-2 of the tau. Anyhow, this is an experimental paper. The relevant calculations have been understood for a long time.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Re:MS Word formatThere was a long discussion of this on Slashdot a while back. From what I remember, the gist of it was that you start running into problems with insufficient documentation when you have stuff like spreadsheets embedded in Word files.
Reverse-engineering
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Re:engineerspretty much everyone (IMHO) is against something like this
I'm in favor of it. I have two kids, who I take to daycare in the back of my car. I don't want them killed by some maniac driving an SUV 20 m.p.h. over the speed limit. The parking lot at my school is like a death trap, with hormonal teenagers driving 45 mph. As a pedestrian, I'm also tired of trying to cross the street at a crosswalk while pushing a kid in a stroller, and getting cut off by some crackhead making a right turn.I think the problem is that the proposed system doesn't go far enough. How about having the signal kill the ignition on people's engine if a satellite detects that they're tailgating, or talking on their cell phone while they drive?
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Help needed by Nupedia?What kind of help does Nupedia need the most? --
- writing articles
- peer reviewing
- editors for certain subject areas
- copyediting
- software work
- software documentation
Re software work, Nupedia has just changed over to new software, which seems a little raw. Is it on CVS? Would you like to get offers of help from people with good track records writing open-source software?
Sorry if I sound like a whiner, but as a Nupedia newbie (nubie?), I was pretty discouraged by the lack of understandable, current documentation, and stuff like underlined text that turned out not to be real hyperlinks,...
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Re:GNUPedia vs. Nupedia
See this Slashdot story.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Re:Project Gutenberg acceptance in schools
Well, keep in mind that school districts are used to buying books at wholesale prices and then reusing them for many years. Laser-printing a whole book at 5 cents per page and then paying for binding may not sound cheap to them.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Re:using text in other worksThe prelude to the whole Nupedia/GNUpedia thing was that Nupedia had already been discussing licenses with Stallman, and had already agreed to go GFDL.
One difficult issue with GFDL is that everything has to be available in a form that can be edited with free software. This is a big problem for people who do their line art using proprietary software. For example, I did a book using Adobe Illustrator for the line art. When I decided to open-source the book, it wasn't legally possible for me to use GFDL -- I had to use OPL. In this respect, I think GFDL can be a license in search of a technology.
A related issue is that I don't think Nupedia has really finalized their decisions on what formats to use for illustrations and for equations...?
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Re:What do we expect?Sounds like you didn't read the article. The article goes into lots of detail on how the drug companies don't make any significant profits in most of these countries, and it wouldn't actually cost them anything to loosen up and let these countries produce their own drugs.
The article also explains how the IP laws we're talking about have specific provisions for emergencies and mandatory licensing. The article suggests approaches that stay within the law.
The article also explains that the drug companies undertook most of their research before most of these third-world countries were even signatories to the relevant treaties about IP. The third-world market, which they've intentionally priced themselves out of, was never even a factor in their decision to do the research.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Why?You don't say why your school wants to do distance learning. Without knowing what they hope to accomplish, it's hard to say what technology would be appropriate.
Usually administrators see distance learning as a way of making money. They get the same tuition or fees, but don't have to pay for heating a classroom, janitors, etc. What they don't realize is that doing distance learning right is very expensive, not least because it's a huge amount of work for the instructor to set up the first time, and they can't do it without release time.
There are also some real problems associated with distance learning. Students don't form the same kind of social bonds they normally would. In the science classes I teach, I like to have the students do little hands-on experiments, which they wouldn't be able to do at home. And of course, how do you teach labs? There's also the issue of students pulling scams, like getting help on exams. (At my school, we recently had a person take an entire course for someone else.) Students in these courses also tend to lack the necessary commitment. Of course, all these problems were problems back when distance learning meant TV telecourses. Distance learning has usually been a failure, and probably will be until technology changes drastically (like really fast broadband access in all the students' homes).
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Blame the babiesYeah, and blame the babies, too. It's their fault that Dad was promiscuous, and they deserve to die a slow and painful death for Dad's sins.
The Assayer - free-information book reviews -
Re:Technology and realistic politicsWell, duh. If copyright was abandoned tomorrow we wouldn't need the GPL any more.
Then why was it necessary to invent copyleft instead of just putting free software in the public domain?I'm trying to find an actual argument in your post, but there doesn't seem to be one.
One thing copyleft does is to prevent is free information from "backsliding" and becoming unfree. In a world without copyright, the only way to prevent this would be to hoard free information, trying very hard to make sure you always had a copy of the latest version. Otherwise the author could just stop providing copies, and you'd be out of luck.
The GPL also has the viral property that it prohibits you from mixing GPL'd software with non-GPL'd software. Whether yout think this is good or bad, it would no longer work that way without copyright.
I can only think of one feature of copyleft that would be obviated by abolishing copyright, and that's the protection against having other people try to take your free information and make it their own intellectual property.
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