Slashdot Mirror
Launching Gutenberg Radio - Public Domain Audiobooks
tgbg writes "We are proud to announce the launch of "Gutenberg Radio". On these broadcast channels,
you can hear the Gutenberg Library and anything else the Gutenberg
family cares to share with its public."
They're using Microsoft Sam to read the books.
I thought I could find sound bytes of Police Academy , Short Circuit, or Cocoon on here... where are they? What gives?
These are NOT HUMANS reading the Project Gutenberg books to you. This is a COMPUTER generated reading of the books. If you enjoy the soothing voice of Stephen Hawking then you will enjoy listening to Project Gutenberg radio. I could only take about 2 minutes of Tolstoys' "The Cossacks" before I had to shut it off.
Gutenburg helped end the need for everything to be said...
Writing was invented long before Gutenberg.
Wait. Who the hell are the Gutenberg family? :P
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
It will be a little strange hearing an a guy saying "one zero zero one zero..."
Or instead of retroactively extending copyright by 10 years every 10 years, Congress could be direct and say "before 1928 it's public domain, after 1928 it's copyrighted". Why 1928? [Congress answering with a straight face]: "Because that's when Mickey Mouse was born".
This is exciting. I just can't wait for Gutenberg video to come out. My votes for priority works to be put into public domain video include: Lady Chatterly's Lover and for the more perverse slashdotters out there, Lolita.
The classics will really come alive!
Man, I hope they do justice to Police Academy, Short Circuit, Cocoon, and Three Men and a Baby. I think those Gutenberg classics will be fabulous as audiobooks.
(And rising every second.) I guess slashdot hasn't quite kicked into top gear yet, then. :)
Actually, funny you should bring that up at all. Yesterday, I was in Barnes and Noble and came across one of Stephen Hawking's audio books on CD, and it's HIM reading it using his voice synthesizer, for the whole damned book.
This is the one I saw, I believe.
I'm of the opinion that if the voice doesn't sound British, they're wasting everyone's time. All audio books should be read by British people. It's probably some crappy free robotic sounding voice.
Hey, what would a british robot sound like?
[British]Crush! Kill! Destroy! Pip pip![/British]
(Incidently, I'm not British, but I work with one and somehow it's rubbing off on me. I actually said "bloody" the other day. Being Canadian, this could get downright messy. "This poutine bloody sucks, eh?" *shudder*)
Robots are everywhere, and they eat old people's medicine for fuel.
While it would be quite pathetic to admit the true intention behind the seemingly infinite amount of times they will extend copyright(and a big thanks to the Supreme Court for OK'ing it), I almost wish they'd just grant Disney a special exemption on their independently created characters (i.e. no Cinderella, Snow White, etc...) and put the copyright on everything else back to a reasonable amount (life + 50?).
I think it's a great injustice that there are people who died that quite probably intended their works to be in the Public Domain by now, and we're depriving the citizens of this country (and others) of the multitude of works created in the past 70 years. It's not only disgraceful, it's unconstitutional.
Immediately after, a bunch of hackers with nothing to do open doobisney, dumbisney, and such companies.
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Score 3? For what? Being wrong, at length? - smirkleton
The Chinese of 1300, for whatever reasons, decided that they didn't need to keep going forward in the sciences, so they didn't.
Though I am neither a linguist or a historian, I have heard that explanation. I don't buy it. Frankly, putting on academic airs, and then declaring that the "real" reason China isn't as advanced as Europe is that "they" decided not to be, whoever "they" might be, is pretty pathetic. How do people just decide not to go forward in science? By not spreading knowledge! The movable type printing press was a tremendously powerful tool for spreading learning in Europe. One can argue about the precise magnitude of the impact, but I personally believe that at the very least, the printing press made it nearly impossible to stop scientific progress. By providing a tool to widely disseminate learning, advances were spread across the continent that might otherwise have languished in obscurity.
Just because technology is now advanced enough to accomodate a language with thousands of distinct symbols doesn't mean that it didn't hold them back at the time. Just because the Chinese can build on the European advances of the industrial revolution doesn't mean that the Chinese were capable of advancing to the point of having their own industrial revolution without outside aid.
"The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than that of whether a submarine can swim" -EWD
I have heard that explanation. I don't buy it. Frankly, putting on academic airs, and then declaring that the "real" reason China isn't as advanced as Europe is that "they" decided not to be
What happened to Greece? They were the most cultured country in the western world, the envy of every country around them. Alexander the Great conquered Afganistan, Egypt and everything in between, and installed, not his birth culture, but that of the Greeks. And then they stopped growing, and became just another appendage to various empires for the next couple thousand years.
What about Germany? In 1900, Germany was the center of the mathematical world, holding a crown that Greece made for herself so long ago. Between then and now, this crown, as well as several other scientific ones left Germany and headed for America's shores. Why? There's certainly no technical reason why; the reasons are all cultural.