Slashdot Mirror
Underground Surfaces
Julian Assange writes: "I'm very pleased to announce that thanks to Random House, Suelette
Dreyfus and myself the complete and unabridged electronic text to our
well-known book "Underground: tales of hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier" (approx 500 pp.) has been publicly and freely released... hacked to support Palm Doc!" Good reading.
As a result, I was able to see that there is a mirror of the plain text here and of the palm doc version here
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according to the introduction, the text of the book was also donated to project gutenberg. this is extremely cool. i hope it opens the doors for more authors to do the same thing.
there is a conflict, though. the free version i downloaded has quite a few restrictions, and is basically only for personal use; it even forbids using it as teaching material. and the author retains the copyright.
this is a change from the standard texts PG distributes. and their boilerplate says: "...this means that no one owns a United States copyright on or for this work..". interesting.
i still hope that the frequency of this type of donation increases.
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In light of this book, it annoys me to see Barnes and Noble and Amazon charging ridiculous amounts of money for Glassreader and MSReader books. If the book is $20 in hardcover and I am supposed to pay around $300 for the device, I better see some serious discounting on the ebook. Marketing and author's royalties aside, the cost of making the hardcover version of book has to be significant, otherwise why would they run paperback versions at $7.
http://promo.net/pg/volunteer.html
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this is not intended as a dig, merely a reason why you would NOT hear of it going on, it's hardly what schools brag about.
I went to an above-average high school. Which was quite proud of it's co-ed policies regarding sewing and metalwork etc.
However, after getting straight A's for a single compulsory metalwork class, I asked to join the next metalwork class (which had never been done before), only to be told I couldn't "because you're a girl". No joke. I thought perhaps it was just one or two old-fashioned folks who were blocking me, but that wasn't the case.
The school was deadset against it, but after threatening them with legal action, I was able to join the class, but was given special "girl" projects. Rather than continue welding and learning other regular skills, I was instructed to make a pretty brass spoon, which was the ONLY thing I was expected to complete.
I didn't make their crappy spoon, as my male teacher was violently opposed to their silliness, and he let me weld to my hearts content, I outproduced every male in the class, in quality and quantity for every project (straight A's, top of the class).
When robotics was added to our classwork, I helped our teacher learn (they don't bother to train teachers for new subjects anymore, just buy them a couple of books) to use an Apple2E (he'd never used a computer before), which interfaced with lego technic robots. I debugged BASIC everyday, wrote demonstration programs to impress parents of new students.
And all of that I would have been deprived of... because I was a girl!
And aside from my metalwork class, no one in the school had any idea of the crap going on behind the scenes, because I was told to keep quiet until it was all sorted out.
Sexism is alive and well in many places. I'm lucky I have a brilliant teacher to thank for my continued education.
And for the record, I don't consider myself a feminist. There are some things that certain people do better than others. But I think sex has little to do with it. A tall and strong woman would easily outwork a short a weak man in a physical environment. Just as a tall and strong man would easily outwork a short and weak woman.
People are individuals, assuming things based on sex, race, appearance or whatever may well prove you to be an idiot.
Something I get quite sick of, is it being assumed I want to have children. Not all women want children, not all men do either, but people don't seem to expect them to.