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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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.