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And "who mommy or daddy is."

Another example of Hartman's law in action. And yes, that was a fragment.

There's a lot of variant texts of Shakespeare's plays, because he apparently never intended them to be published. The differences are largest for the "bad quartos", which are basically low quality bootlegs, but it's true to some degree for of all of the primary sources. Between the sources that scholars work with, and the book form that you read in high school, there has been a significant amount of editing.

For an author like Jane Austen, the editing is much less substantial. If I'm not mistaken, her novels were published after the present style of capitalization became popular for printed works in England. There may be some regularization of spelling and punctuation going on, but I suspect it's pretty minor. The editions I've seen retain at least some of the original spellings in words such as "surprize", so perhaps it is so throughout the text.

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/1497.cf m

I think the core assertion of the anti-neutrality folks is that higher
bandwidth users are not paying their fair share. I'm not buying that
right now - I thought if you want more bandwidth, you must pay for it
- just like home users. It's always been like that! Am I missing
something?

It's more and more seeming to me that the core issue is based around
the legal right to allow and block traffic across your internetwork
based on who is sending it. If you disagree that telecom companies
should be able to do this, you support neutrality.

"According to Werbach: "There are really two issues in the network
neutrality debate: Should government step in when broadband network
owners discriminate against unaffiliated content and services, and
should there be a prospective rule mandating non-discrimination? I'm
very troubled by the possibility that network operators will act in
anticompetitive ways against application and content providers, but I
find it hard to craft a workable legal rule prohibiting such actions."

I am more and more thinking the 'paying for higher useage' thing is a
red herring. I think that already exists.

The issue is the ability to block/allow traffic based on sender.

Mathematicians would be a lot less Platonistic, I think, if they'd take courses in semiotics. There's a big difference between the symbol and its referent. Apples exist; but integers exist only when there's someone there to count them. That's why you can have human societies with no conception of "number" at all - where the only "amounts" of anything they can perceive are none, one, and many.

Some ideas for you:

• Read Language Log, a blog written by professional linguists. One of their favorite pastimes is debunking preposterous myths; like the supposed existence of cultures who have no concept of number beyond none, one and many.
  
• Learn something about mathematics. The debate about the nature of mathematics has been going on for well over a century, and long predates the study of semiotics. Mathematician != platonist.
  

Bollocks, I've just been trolled haven't I?

Well, they're an independent record label, but I doubt that was the reference he was going for. The Urban Dictionary defines it as something "completely useless", but doesn't provide any etymology. Here's an article on chocolate teapots and fireguards, which might make more sense if one knew what a fireguard was. You'd think that Fireguard Systems, Inc. might answer that question, but if they do, I can't tell where. Ah, finally New Zealand comes to the rescue.

I'm mayed to hear that.

While that's an advertent remark, it's fairly promptu and something to sneeze at, after all the original inspiration is far more ept and sipid:

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/how-i-me t-my-wife.html

That is odd. I never signed a contract when I got married. If I was still married would I be arrested for not signing the "marriage contract"?

Just because something is illegal does not mean it is wrong. Just because it is wrong does not make it illegal. For example, it is illegal in the USA state of Georgia to have oral sex with your wife. At least it was in 1989 when James David Moseley went to prison for 17 months for going down on his wife. It was consensual. http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~kurisuto/sodomy.html

I have an open relationship. Each of us get to play with most anyone we want to. There are a few rules, but not many. In my world there isn't a lot of difference between "lying" and "cheating" in a relationship. They are both a violation of trust.

I don't have a lot of sympathy for a guy that is on match.com trying to "find someone the side", but only because he is trying to hide it. To me that is also a violation of trust.

Although SELinux is a step in the right direction it's still basically a system of ACLs. It still suffers from the problem of the confused deputy. I think proponents of object-capability based security are correct in their thinking. Some interesting stuff going on in this respect is the E programing language.

you have to look fairly long and hard to find an OSS project that *isn't* just a reimplementation of an existing product.

Please let us know of what commercial products the following OSS projects are mere reimplementations:

• gcc
• emacs
• TeX
• Python
• Tcl
• emdros
• redet
• Transcriber
• csound

If it's a USB mass storage device, you could use the unison file synchronizer. It has a simple graphical interface.

The commenter you quoted understates his point -- not only are collectively-authored myths and Shakespeare's adaptations a human norm, but even what we would properly call "fan fiction" today has a longer history than many people suppose. I first realized this when someone pointed me to this book about the widespread nature of what could only be called 18th-century fanfic.

The online OED allegedly has the use as a transitive verb marked (obs).

Word nerds:
http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archive s/002222.html

Sadly, the primary source (oed.com) is not available through bugmenot.

Indeed, since copyright is a violation of Laissez-faire economics by being a coercive monopoly (specifically a government-granted monopoly), it is obviously anti-capitalist. It may be fruitful to contrast your opinion of copyright as "anti-capitalist" with the Copyright Act of 1790, which begins with the introductory words "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning". Its motivation was stated in the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution, but looking at the rationale (see Senate Report No. 104-315) for its extension (see Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act) from the original total of 28 years to today's 95 years (corporate ownership), "the continued economic benefits of a healthy surplus balance of trade", there is an obvious shift towards a economic mindset. Actually, there is a complete shift I would rather say. When devised, copyright was never intended as a direct instrument of economics, so its effect as "anti-capitalist" would have been subordinate to its original goal of being an instrument "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Instead, what we see today is rather bizarre. For a truly eerie prospect of what to expect, consider this statement by Mary Bono (see Congressional Record No 139, pages H9951 and H9952):

Actually, Sonny wanted the term of copyright protection to last forever. I am informed of by staff that such a change would violate the Constitution. I invite all of you to work with me to strengthen our copyright laws in all of the ways available to us. As you know, there is also Jack Valenti's proposal for term to last forever less one day. Perhaps the Committee may look at that next Congress.

(Yes, the evidence is there, despite denials). In plain english, and for all practical purposes, there is no limit to copyright protection anymore - by 2018, both houses of the United States Congress will pass a new act to further extend copyright, as a formality. How one concludes that "securing for limited Times" should mean "forever less one day" rather than a reasonable amount of time, as in reasonably within ones life-time, or more meaningfully as in reasonably useful within ones life-time (such as, say, 6 years for software), is beyond me. The economic reasoning behind perpetual copyright is explained by professor Neil W. Netanel (see Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society):

This "neoclassicist" approach posits that, far from simply inducing the creation and dissemination of new expression, copyright serves as a vehicle for directing investment in existing works. Neoclassicists would accordingly treat literary and artistic works as "vendible commodities," best made subject to broad proprietary rights that extend to every conceivable valued use. In this manner, neoclassicists contend, market pricing can direct resource allocation for the marketing and development of existing creative expression in an optimally efficient manner.

I would be inclined to conclude that, in a world of conglomarates, market forces replace Learning as the "optimally efficient manner" by which creative expression can be developed. Obviously, this is utter nonsense, but I would say it captures the essence of what proponents of perpetual copyright would have us believe. The true and unstated objective is, of course, to preserve existing monopolies. As pointed out by Timothy R. Phillips, "The framers assumed, as did Adam Smith, th

http://www.sas.upenn.edu/earth/giegenga.html

hey, i'm not the climatologist, he is; you want to hear what he has to say, go right ahead. his argument was pretty convincing, though i'm not completely convinced. my personal opinion now is that we still shouldn't be producing as much co2 or anything, to be on the safe side.

as far as the thing about humans vs planet, i meant that more in an overall sense (i referenced dinosaurs...).

the hybrid thing though; the infrastructure is there -- there are electrical outlets everywhere. furthermore, personal sized engines are much less efficient than ones based on creating electrical energy could be (at least in theory; i don't know about the actual efficiency of coal powerplants, but if i were to build one i'd care about that a lot, and i don't have to facilitate changes in rpm like a car's engine would, even in a hybrid).

so, even if the electricity is taken from a fossil fuel plant it's not as bad as a hybrid. a hybrid, though, has some of the downsides of an electric car: in the production of batteries there is often pollution, for example. we could say that about pretty much anything, but just wanted to throw that out there, since we could say the same thing about solar panels. ...and i think we all have problems with the use of fossil fuel powerplants anyway. we probably agree there. we should be using, well, pretty much anything else.

I wonder if they are using this study "Clickprints on the Web: Are there signatures in Web browsing data?" ; which explains in detail how a user can be tracked by user interaction. Nice thing to read, for sure if you know you could also "be" the parameter (invalidating such methods completely) in such ways of tracking.

The notable difference between Chinese and English (or most other written languages) is that several English characters combine to form syllables, which combine to form words (i.e., we use an alphabet). In Chinese, each character corresponds directly with a word (each character is a logogram).

Actually, this is pretty much a myth that originated from people with very little knowledge of Chinese language and writing. In all the Chinese languages ("dialects";-), most of the vocabulary is two-syllable words, as in English. Three-syllable words aren't uncommon. The writing system is actually a sort of syllabary, and the meaning of most two-character words can't be inferred from knowing what the syllables mean as standalone words.

It's similar to how lots of English words, e.g. "insight", can be parsed as two words ("in"+"sight"), but this doesn't really help you understand what the word actually means. Or, an example that shows how such things evolve is the English word "upstairs". If I say I'm going upstairs and take the elevator, did I lie to you? Of course not, because "upstairs" doesn't mean going up stairs. It did a few centuries ago, but hasn't meant that during the lifetime of anyone alive now. Similarly, proto-Chinese of N thousand years ago may have been mostly single-syllable words, but this hasn't been true for at least the few thousand years that we have readable examples of the writing system.

For a Mandarin example, which I'll write in pinyin (or pin1yin1;-) to get past the /. filters, consider the word zi4ran2. The zi4 syllable is a word, and means "from" or "since" (and is also used like "-ly" to form adverbs). The ran2 syllable is also a word, and basically means "correct" or "yes". The zi4ran2 combination means "nature" or "naturally". Like "insight", you might be able to kludge some sort of connection here, but in reality you just have to learn zi4ran2 as a separate word unrelated to its two syllables. It may have been a two-word idiom several thousand years ago; it's a two-syllable word now.

For an entertaining debunking of both this myth and a very common trope among Western pseudo-intellectuals and pop psychologists, read this article at languagelog. After chuckling at that particular bit of silliness about Chinese writing, you can find other articles there that go into the general problem in more detail. A number of experts in East-Asian linguistics regularly contribute to that blog, and they've been pushing for a campaign to debunk the nonsense that Westerners insist on saying about these languages.

Oh, well; I haven't yet heard any claim that Chinese doesn't have a word for "freedom". But I wouldn't be surprised. (Hint: the word starts with the same character as the above "zi4ran2", but has a different second character. ;-)

Short of multiple users who want to swap between QWERTY, Dvorak and other languages

There are rather a lot of those. The market among expatriate Russians alone (it's no coincidence that this is a Russian development) would be in the tens of millions. Then add bilingual Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian subcontinent languages - gosh, we're into the billions of potential users already (bilingualism is practically universal in the information industry).

Taking a standard keyboard and pencilling Cyrillic/whatever next to the Roman letters is a PITA. $1500 - obviously a short run - is a pricey cure, but there is a market of millions when the unit cost comes down.

Well, I'll point you to a quick intro on chaotic systems: http://www.physics.upenn.edu/courses/gladney/mathp hys/subsection3_2_5.html

The main point to remember is that while chaotic systems can be stable over one range of values, a very small change outside that range can result in dramatic changes in behavior. I'm not going to argue where that tipping point is, merely that the current indicators that we have seem to show that we are past the tipping point (glacier melts in Antarctica, slowing of gulf stream, etc).

Unfortunately, while very Churchill, this is believed to be a misattribution.

Who's a liar? If you dare to read from one of those dangerous books, you will be disciplined.

>That in five minutes you COULDN'T care less about. Don't use a phrase if you don't know how to use it.

You fail it.

If you don't understand the language completely, you don't get to complain.

Both are perfectly valid turns of phrase. One American, one British.

Could care less: I am so uninterested that while I could care less about the subject, I'm not even bothered to that point. Also, I am so interested that I care about the subject, therefore proving I could care less.

Couldn't care less: I am so uninterested that my caring level is at zero. Also, I am so interested that caring less would be physically impossible.

Both are correct and incorrect at the same time.

Yes, it's on the list of English errors. That in itself is an error, as the author is American. He needs to read up on his English history a bit, perhaps? alt.usage.english beat him to the punch on this one. Oddly enough, this clearly prescriptive English teacher is pro ending sentences in prepositions. How contradictory. He does agree he is fighting a losing battle on it (One he lost BEFORE he put up the website, ironically).

Irregardless, I ain't wrong. Here's some more references on the matter. Cheap at half the price, I tell you!

BTW: This topic truly is important to me, I couldn't care less about it, so don't ask me to. I could care less for rants about it, though, but sometimes I miss them. :-P

Teach, where's my gold star?

>That in five minutes you COULDN'T care less about. Don't use a phrase if you don't know how to use it.

You fail it.

If you don't understand the language completely, you don't get to complain.

Both are perfectly valid turns of phrase. One American, one British.

Could care less: I am so uninterested that while I could care less about the subject, I'm not even bothered to that point. Also, I am so interested that I care about the subject, therefore proving I could care less.

Couldn't care less: I am so uninterested that my caring level is at zero. Also, I am so interested that caring less would be physically impossible.

Both are correct and incorrect at the same time.

Yes, it's on the list of English errors. That in itself is an error, as the author is American. He needs to read up on his English history a bit, perhaps? alt.usage.english beat him to the punch on this one. Oddly enough, this clearly prescriptive English teacher is pro ending sentences in prepositions. How contradictory. He does agree he is fighting a losing battle on it (One he lost BEFORE he put up the website, ironically).

Irregardless, I ain't wrong. Here's some more references on the matter. Cheap at half the price, I tell you!

BTW: This topic truly is important to me, I couldn't care less about it, so don't ask me to. I could care less for rants about it, though, but sometimes I miss them. :-P

Teach, where's my gold star?

I've always found it difficult to beat some of the AI from this project:
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~poker

You could Unison (*nix, OS X, Windows) to keep your home directory synced between multiple machines, but another option might be to just get rid of the desktop altogether. Plug the monitor and keyboard into your laptop when you're at home and you'll always have all your data with you when you take it away.

It dates back to even before ancient Egypt to the mountains of western Iran

Absolute hilarity.

I love watching the legion of armchair linguists crawl out of the woodwork every time an article includes what is erroneously believed to be a grammatical error. It's just pure comedy.

Here's an idea... Burn your copy of Strunk & White. Why? It's a steaming pile of crap. Reading that book does not make you a master of english grammar, from whose high throne you can look down on the snarling masses of illiterate philistines, laughing. No. Reading that book actually tends to turn people into blithering idiots who get their panties in a bunch over utter bullshit. That's what happens when you read the work of hypocrits... men who thoroughly failed to even consider their own advice.

God forbid anyone do any research. No, no, no. It's far better to parrot the same incorrect, wholly invented rules that were parroted to you. If you actually did some research on the matter, you might find that the use of "less" with countable items dates back at least a thousand years. God fucking forbid.

For those who would like to read something cogent on the matter instead of parroting falsehoods in holier-than-thou voices, this subject is occasionally covered at Language Log. Take a gander at this article for a start.

That's all. We now return you to your regularly scheduled feeding frenzy.

You are a fool (and a dick) if you get worked up about such a minor 'error'. Let me guess, you are a fan of Elements of style?

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archive s/004147.html

There's nothing wrong with initial "and". (I.e., YHBT, YHL, HAND.)

I'm aware that you're being sarcastic. Nonetheless, as the topic of conservapedia has come up, I want to spread this link: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archive s/004258.html#more Great article about the current state of the wiki, with respect to linguistic issues.

Anyone remember Unocal?

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?art icleid=1240&CFID=4936540&CFTOKEN=31436615 http://journalism.berkeley.edu/projects/worldandus /archives/2006/04/people_daily_we.php

Yeah, things like "mama" and "papa" tend to be independantly developed from infants babbling - there's an interesting discussion on it here, but I think we're well off topic now :)

--Simon

The problem of autonomous reconfiguration planning is still quite a barrier to these robots. The majority of work that's been done in the field has been generally ad-hoc approaches where specific control algorithms are applied to specific problems (ie. if the robots form a loop then how do you coordinate a rolling gait). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Reconfiguring_Mo dular_Robotics That's a link to a wikipedia page that does a reasonable job at identifying the currently most difficult problems researchers face in modular robot development. http://modlab.seas.upenn.edu/ This is a link to the lab I work in, we also develop a variant of the superbot currently in the process of being refined. Click 'CKbot', then click 'movies' to see some recent clips of our bots in action, including a much improved rolling gait to the one linked to in the article.

I think it did a lot of work as a serial processor. From this description:

"The ENIAC was controlled through a train of electronic pulses."

--and--

"because the various units of the ENIAC could operate simultaneously, the ENIAC could perform calculations in parallel. (BUT!) ENIAC programmers tended to avoid this use because the impressive but limited reliability of the ENIAC favored the use of as few units as possible for a given application."

Using less on countable items has a history of hundreds of years. There is no irony in the grandparent's usage of less, although there is a bit in yours.

Well the first batch of greedy scientists have already pledged themselves to attack the IPCC report: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archive s/004133.html.
Oh damn, is "batch" a singular or plural subject? ... "have" or "has"? I guess I'll have to wait until the linguists are done with their climate research.

Regardless of how you feel about MS and its attempts at spin control, let's not loose sight of the really important thing here---OOXML is a bad standard. Its many flaws are well documented. Try any of these links to find out about some of them: http://www.grokdoc.net/index.php/EOOXML_objections As a linguist, the pathetic language encoding (which ignores the ISO standard) is particularly galling: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archive s/004065.html

This is all put better than I could do it here. I think this has been discussed before, but it's worth revisiting.

By making pirate copies of Vista run in reduced-functionality mode, it seems as though Microsoft is moving back toward the generally accepted definition.

Support is not use, in trademark terms. Existence of a support website (that says InfoGear was recently acquired by Cisco) does not support a claim of use of a trademark. It might support a claim of use of a service mark.

University of Florida refers to an IPhone service (note the capitalization), not an iPhone product. In fact, most of the time Florida refers to its VoIP service as I-Phone (note the capitalization and dash):

I-Phone is a new solutions-offering presented by OIT-Telecom that takes advantage of the convergence of voice and data networks.
The I-Phone service is part of the "services-to-wallplate" model that is offered by OIT-Network Services and is designed to ultimately provide an enterprise communications solution for the University of Florida.

University of Pennsylvania refers to a web-based service called My iPhone (alternatively referred to as Penn iPhone):

My iPhone is a web service that allows you to manage certain telephone features and voice mail options from a web browser.

Neither University is using a product called iPhone (except legacy units purchased 5+ years ago). They are both using a service they refer to as, in the case of Florida, I-Phone (VoIP) and, in the case of Pennsylvania, My iPhone (web manager).

Cisco's disuse of the mark in trade for a period of five plus years hurts their case considerably. A support web page that has not changed in five plus years offering service with respect to the mark may help a bit, but not much.

This is just some bloggers, not a legal opinion, even if it's from a lawyer.

Here's a demonstration that Cisco was continuously using the trademark: the support web site for the iPhone, as archived at archive.org. "With InfoGear recently being acquired by Cisco Systems, there is currently no change to your iPhone coverage. We hope you continue to enjoy using your iPhone, and we thank you for your business. So, even if Cisco wasn't selling new units, they were still supporting the old ones. That page has been archived every year since 2000, so that's a form of continuous use.

There's an active user base. The University of Florida went iPhone. There's a description of their configuration here. They have a VoIP infrastructure with three Cisco CallManagers, two Cisco 6608 VoIP gateways, a Cisco Unity voice mail system, and many Cisco IP telephones, some of which are iPhone units, on desktops. The University of Pennsylvania also went iPhone. There are probably corporate installations too, but they tend not to publish their phone instructions on the public web. Those installations have to be supported, which is something Cisco does, and gets paid for. Cisco is in the network infrastructure business, after all.

As long as there's support, and support-related revenue, the trademark is clearly in use.

I'm reading his papers, and I'm not too impressed. Read his "Network Neutrality and the Economics of Congestion", where he pontificates on that subject.

Where he goes off track is at "Fortunately, policymakers wishing to address theses problems can draw on the extensive theoretical literature exploring the economics of congestion. Much of the literature has focused on the choice between flat-rate pricing and usage-sensitive pricing. The primary finding of this literature is that competitive markets will reach an efficient equilibrium if each user is charged a usage-sensitive price set equal to their marginal contribution to congestion. 28" Reference 28 is to "28 See, e.g., Eitan Berglas, On the Theory of Clubs, 66 AM. ECON REV. 116, 119 (1976).", which is a classic paper on periodic vs per-use pricing for things like gyms and swimming pools, but is not about congestion at all.

Yao does get some things right. He recognizes that the billing cost (he says "transaction cost", but means billing overhead) for things like the Internet is higher than the cost of providing the service, and this distorts the economics from the pay-for-what-you-get model economists usually like.

But then he goes off into a right-wing rant on why vertically integrated monopolies are good. The competition between the vertically integrated monopolies will supposedly prevent prices from rising. However, he states that as an article of faith, without support. Historically, when a market gets down to small number of players, (two or three), price competition tends to weaken. The fewer the players, the easier de-facto collusion becomes.

He ignores many issues. Time scale, for example. Congestion is a problem on a scale of minutes, while carrier-switching by end users occurs on a scale of months. He also ignores contractual lock-in and technical lock-in, which makes carrier switching more expensive. If the end user's strategy is to minimize their costs over the next year, then carriers can raise their rates each year by any amount less than the cost of switching, and get away with it. He ignores that completely. (This is a chronic problem with economists. Like control theorists, they study feedback systems, but unlike control theorists, they don't consider time domain issues like stability, settling time, oscillation, and phase locking issues much.)

There's also the technical issue in Internet congestion that the congestion is mostly at the edges. If you have your own wire to the central office, as with DSL, why should there be price differentiation depending on what data you're sending and receiving? Yet it's the DSL providers who don't want network neutrality. It's not the backbone providers. Thus, congestion isn't the real issue. Wanting a bigger piece of the TV viewer's entertainment spending is.

There are people who've written well about the economics of network congestion, but this guy isn't one of them.

The BBC's point is well taken but ironic in light of their own rather pathetic record.

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

unison is the best thing since sliced bread. keep your mailboxes in Maildir/ format and just unison between the machines periodically. since unison is symmetric, you can pull your mail down from either your laptop or your desktop and it will propegate to the other one on the next sync.

Not so fast. Actual linguists have looked at the data with better tools and are highly skeptical of the missing "a". See, for example, http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archive s/003632.html

Agreed with the "most of it is garbage". See the Language Log for informed debunking of 45 and 57 (btw, the Language Log is highly recommended. In the best Reithian traditions, it manages to "inform, educate and entertain" - something the BBC website would do well to take note of). The quality of science and technology reporting on the BBC (and this goes for all news organisations that I'm aware of) is just pitiful.

You can actually browse by call number in many online catalogs. It's
of limited use, though, since linear browsing isn't the most useful
way to browse by subject, particularly if you can't easily pick books
off the virtual "shelf" to examine.

On the Online Books Page, I offer both the classic "browse the shelves
by call number" browse, and a more multidimensional subject map browse. To
compare the two, here's the call number browse interface for science:

      http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/s ubjectstart?Q

and here's the "subject map" browse interface for science:

      http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/b rowse?type=lcsubc&key=Science

Since this is a directory of online books, you can look at the books themselves as you're browsing them.

You can actually browse by call number in many online catalogs. It's
of limited use, though, since linear browsing isn't the most useful
way to browse by subject, particularly if you can't easily pick books
off the virtual "shelf" to examine.

On the Online Books Page, I offer both the classic "browse the shelves
by call number" browse, and a more multidimensional subject map browse. To
compare the two, here's the call number browse interface for science:

      http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/s ubjectstart?Q

and here's the "subject map" browse interface for science:

      http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/b rowse?type=lcsubc&key=Science

Since this is a directory of online books, you can look at the books themselves as you're browsing them.

1. Most libraries' collections are very similar to most other libraries' collections, and the greatest overlap occurs with the books that are the most important.
2. This is all about PD stuff, since OCA isn't proposing to do anything still in copyright. Less ephemeral works (the kind typically preserved in library collections a century later) generally all had their copyrights renewed in the U.S., so that means we're only talking about pre-1923 materials. Since congress keeps on extending copyright terms, nothing is probably ever going to enter the public domain from 1923 on. That means we're talking about the publishing world of 1922, which was vastly smaller than today's publishing world. Amazon.com has on the order of 10^6 books. To get a feel for the size of the publishing industry in past decades, try browsing through the catalog of renewals; the number of books published was extremely small in the early 19th century.
3. There are many books that won't be in any library's collection, simply because they weren't considered very valuable. You could digitize a thousand libraries, and never find them. Handwriting manuals from 1893. Trashy novels. Etc. In fact, there are a lot of books from the 1930's-1950's that are now PD, because they never had their copyrights renewed, but you're not going to find them in libraries' collections, and in fact it's very unlikely that anyone will ever be interested in them.

Look into unison. I use it on my powerbook and desktop and it just saved 99% of my files from my disk crash last week. The only ones I lost were the ones I wasn't synching (I have a lot of data). I got the max os x binary by looking here: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/unison-users/

Socrates: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them and censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts.

But when they came to etters (i.e–writing), This, said Theuth, will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.

Thamus replied: O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.