I use mplayer with ESD output, as mentioned above; this works fine. I don't have any particular issues with the kernel itself (well, I do--yay for hard freezes due to the wireless driver shitting itself!--but they're separate), but I'm using the operating system as a whole, and while I appreciate the ability to put apps together in any way I wish, the standard methods it ships with should work properly. I don't know whether to specifically blame Ubuntu, or gstreamer, or GNOME, but something is definitely broken in there.
I plug in a thumb drive or usb hard drive and maybe the OS will notice it and mount it for me, and maybe it won't. Usually it doesn't. Usually, I have to become super-user and perform actions to identify the drive and mount it that would be beyond the knowledge of the average end user. And even if the user does know how to do it, why should they have to? A 10-second task just got turned into a 5-minute task.
Is it that the device isn't showing up, or that the device isn't mounting? That is, does it show up in the output from 'lsusb' or not?
I've never had a working USB mass storage device fail to detect and mount on any of my Linux systems; for me, it's been a solved problem.
USB scanners are the same way. They used to work, now you have to become super-user to use them. Some script that detected scanner plugin events and change the permissions just stopped working.
Weird. The only scanner juggling I've had to do was installing a particular firmware file for my Mustek ScanExpress 1200 UB Plus, because (a) it's not freely redistributable, and (b) there are several different scanners with the same USB ID, and I had to specify which one I had.
Multi-card readers: Same thing. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
As these are just USB mass storage devices, I think it's the same permissions issue you're seeing.
I'd recommend that you open a question at Launchpad Answers and see if you can get some help on this. Something is amiss on your system, and fixing it is probably preferable to working around it like this. (I'm assuming that you're using Ubuntu.)
It seems unlikely this bug [EHCI problems] will ever be fixed.
Well, it certainly won't be fixed unless someone reopens the kernel.org bug report. (The original report was identified as caused by broken hardware; that's why it was closed.)
1. No reliable sound system, no reliable unified software audio mixing, many (old or/and proprietary) applications still open audio output exclusively causing major user problems and headache.
Yes, this. I'm running Ubuntu; I recently upgraded my work machine (driver is snd_intel8x0) from 8.10 to 9.04. I was hoping that PulseAudio would stop freezing up (sound-using applications become unresponsive, and I need to kill and restart PulseAudio), as I'd been assured that the various complaints about PulseAudio were all due to 8.10 shipping a bad, pre-release variant.
I hesitate to use phrases like "PulseAudio proceeded to shit all over my sound" or "play a simple fucking MP3 without skipping, like my five-dollar iPod knockoff does", but they seem apropos here. Perhaps Rhythmbox or gstreamer are at fault here; I don't know--I just know that even with the system idle, sound playback skips and stutters. Mplayer will play sound all right, but video and audio become desynchronized when using the PulseAudio audio driver. Using the esd driver, which is just a frontend to PulseAudio, works. Go fucking figure.
Inability to play a damned MP3 on the included jukebox app with extraordinarily common commodity hardware? What fucking year is this?
5.2 No games. Full stop. Cedega and Wine offer very incomplete support.
Hmph. Someone doesn't like playing emulated console games. True, it's nearly impossible to do so without breaking the law, but he could have at least mentioned it.
(Also, I don't game much, but I completed Eversion, a rather fascinating freeware game, on my Linux desktop, running under Wine without issues. It's not latest-and-greatest, but it's certainly something.)
8.1 Most distros don't allow you to easily set up a server with e.g. such a configuration: Samba, SMTP/POP3, Apache HTTP Auth and FTP where all users are virtual. LDAP is a major PITA. Authentication against MySQL/any other DB is also a PITA.
This seems weirdly specific. How often is this even required? If it is, using NSS with something like libpam-mysql/libnss-mysql looks pretty plausible.
12. Bad security model: there's zero protection against keyboard keyloggers and against running malicious software (Linux is viruses free only due to its extremely low popularity). sudo is very easy to circumvent (social engineering). sudo still requires CLI (see clause 4.).
Any authorization or authentication mechanism of this sort can be bypassed with social engineering. How exactly is this a problem in the operating system--what kind of OS lacks this problem? Should it be locked down so that a licensed sysadmin needs to come by and swipe their ID to allow admin tasks to be performed?
As for keyloggers, I do agree. An X11 keylogger can run without root permission. Give it a run; it's rather unsettling to see it gobble up passwords and such. I'm not sure exactly where the problem lies, but it seems likely that there is a problem.
If the developer in question was doing this commercially, then points about priorities might stand. But it was done solely for fun, for love of an interesting project. To demand that people stop having fun is just... sad.
Sadly, I did some proof reading for the distributed proof reading crowd a while back, and the assholes are so anal about NOT changing errors, that the resultant text is so bad as to be laughable. I no longer do it because I would rather write my own than promote falsehoods as they do. They prefer you to promulgate transcription errors rather than use your brain about what the sentence actually says. Sorry, no. Being true to the author is one thing, being true to the fucking OCR is another matter.
I'm unsure of what you're talking about.
The FAQ states that, first and foremost, don't change what the author wrote; if there's some kind of misprint, mark it for the postprocessor to deal with, but don't silently correct it.
Who told you otherwise, and how did you get the impression that this wasn't the sitewide policy?
I think it has something to do with a specific technical use of the word "energy" in signal processing. My best guess is that codecs apply a set of transformations to a signal and then encode the result; if the result is less energy-intensive, it's smaller when encoded.
Of course, this is just a guess, and I may be mangling the ideas. Search for "residual energy" to see what I've been looking at.
And, to be fair, if they'd gotten a hundred grand in grants a couple of years ago, I'd wager that development would have moved along quite a bit further. Unfortunately, codec optimization is a rather arcane and specialized art; it doesn't lend itself very well to contributors dipping their toes in.
Lossless formats matter less than lossy formats, because, apart from metadata lossage, there's no generational decay. Converting MP3s to Vorbis to AAC or whatever is a terrible idea, but installing the Xiph.org QuickTime package and turning your FLACs into ALACs is roughly as painless as this sort of thing will ever be.
Every single example stated above was in fact done away with, and replaced by, the libertarian ideals you seem to want to argue with.
Exactly! By the libertarian ideals, never sullied by any connection to inconvenient reality or history.
You're looking back from the present and attempting to claim that you'd have been on the right side of history. But the people who were waving your flag at the time--high-minded defenders of individual liberty and property rights--were arguing for subjugation and slavery. As much as you'd like to claim their opponents as your intellectual forebears, it just doesn't hold water.
I'm charmed that you seem to be following my comments since our last exchange, but I'm disappointed that you see things in such a black-and-white way.
I certainly didn't say that, as you put it, "if one thing in the past was bad, it all was bad". I'm pointing out that current perceptions of a fall from some sort of libertarian past tend to leave out things--the enslavement or systematic murder of nonwhites, the subjugation of women--which didn't affect members of the speaking group.
Like I said, if you're a white dude who's not bothered by slavery so long as it's not happening to white dudes, it looks like a pretty good setup. On the other hand, it's difficult, if you're not afflicted with the cognitive rot that seems to accompany libertarianism, to fail to notice that all of these holy, holy property rights seemed to be exercised quite regularly over the bodies of the majority of the population.
And no, I don't have to voice an opinion on fractional reserve banking, or farm subsidies, or any of a thousand other issues to point out that that's pretty damning.
Here, you don't have to wait at all if you're lucky-ducky enough to lack insurance. You just go about your day and hope that the mysterious chest pain or disturbing bleeding goes away.
If it doesn't, of course, you'll end up much sicker and in the ER, which will be packed with other folks in the same situation, and if you survive, you'll walk out of there with enough debt that you may just be better off losing everything and going bankrupt.
As a Libertarian, I'm not the slightest bit surprised to see Obama take this stance. His entire -- but brief -- political career is replete with examples of such opportunism.
I suppose it must be somewhat comforting to be a member of a political movement which went out of style along with feudalism, so that you're perpetually an outsider, judging the Platonic ideal of your model against the real-world implementation of someone else's.
Trying to stop a legal precedence from being made where private companies should be afraid to help their government, even when their government is with in the scope of the constitution is not the same thing as continuing an illegal spying program on the American citizens.
That's fascinating, but since AT&T was illegally spying on Americans at the government's behest, how is it relevant?
I think we should have a legal precedent made where private companies should be afraid to flagrantly break the fucking law. Don't you?
And you prefer your morals to be ones you're uncertain of? Please, arguing that you shouldn't believe something because you've thought it out to as near the point of certainty as you can some is hardly a brilliant strategy.
I didn't say that it was unlikely that your ideas, as you define them, could be wrong. Because you've defined your morality to be, in essence, that might makes right--and claimed that everyone else holds this same belief--there's no arguing with it. It's self-contained, hermetically sealed. That's what I'm trying to say.
As for the rest? You're obviously confusing morals with mores. Morals are always personal and mores are always a societal consensus.
I dislike definitional arguments. By "morality", I'm referring to your sense of what right and wrong actions are. For instance, I think it's immoral to kill people because they make me nervous, or to expect to have different rules apply to me than apply to other people.
Above all you seem to be misconstruing what I've repeatedly tried to explain. There is no equivalency in morals. It is not possible for there to be without a complete lack of a sense of self.
I'm having difficulty understanding what you mean here. By "moral equivalence", I'm referring to your claim that you hold the same moral values as anyone who was cheerleading the 9/11 attacks. You felt threatened, and according to you, that justified violence carried out on your behalf. By your lights, that's the whole story.
For the purposes of this argument, that means that I don't need to feel Al-Qaeda are amoral bastards to want to see them rounded up and executed. All I need to do is give the proper response to their actions.
I suppose they probably feel the same--there's that equivalence I keep pointing out.
Hell, there were probably plenty of Nazis that were certain they were doing what was good and right; doesn't mean they were any less deserving of a good killing.
And yet feeling that same certainty, that same feeling that darn it, you're doing the right thing, doesn't make you wonder if perhaps you're the bad guy... because you don't think it matters.
You're obviously an educated person; please attempt to be an intelligent one as well. Think about what your brain's been fed before you just go believing it on faith and regurgitating it in public.
What exactly do you think I've been fed? Am I reminding you of someone in particular, or unwittingly quoting something?
Hard SF has more hard science in it, yes, but that doesn't inherently make it more difficult to read. Soft SF--Tiptree, as I mentioned above--can be just as impenetrable.
And the formalism is sometimes hard to recognize as such, since it's done so oddly. Eric Raymond wrote some interesting notes about that, though they are, like everything else he writes, suffused with his own brand of politics.
Oh there's no void in my morals. They're quite clear and sharply defined, thanks much. You just don't happen to agree with me.
They're self-supporting, self-contained and immune to argument or disagreement. They float, as it were, in a void.
I am more important to myself than you are to me. Therefore, my morals are always superior to yours. QED.
Spoken like a true psychopath. Aren't you the least bit familiar with the concept of moral codes that work well if everyone accepts them, both because they benefit the user personally ("I'm not constantly fighting for survival!") and they make for a more pleasant society in general ("We're not riven by brutal and unending conflict!").
"Every man for himself!" isn't a stable solution for anything other than a world in flames. It is a profound lack of morality. By claiming that no one has a better standing than anyone else to define right and wrong--that arguments about utilitarianism and such are irrelevant to your monstrously solipsistic ego--you're defining everyone as morally equivalent.
Nobody saying they aren't good; he's just very difficult to read, especially if you're not already steeped in the genre's forms and traditions. There are plenty of authors who are difficult to read; it doesn't necessarily make them bad. (James Tiptree, Jr. is another one that springs to mind--fantastic stories, but pretty difficult to get into.)
I'm no longer satisfied by hard science fiction that can't also be decent well-rounded literature.
I hear you. For my part, I'm no longer satisfied by decent well-rounded literature that can't be bothered to include some decent ideas. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be much of a barrier to critical acclaim.
Project Gutenberg clears works under "Rule 6"; some works which appear to be orphaned, published before 1963, are in fact in the public domain, but it takes a significant amount of legwork to prove this.
The Wikimedia people have staked quite a bit on the assumption that Bridgeman v. Corel will hold up in situations like the one you describe, so it seems at least plausible. (Note that Google could copyright scans in Britain, since their copyright law recognizes new copyright on simple slavish reproductions, as ridiculous as that is.)
Of course, the best thing would be for Google to simply not claim a new copyright on their scans.
No, now that Google has put the brunt of their weight and money on the issue, I would dare to say the next person who comes along will simply need to pay for the scanning service and access to the library.
Yeah, good luck with that. You'll notice that Project Gutenberg still gets nastygrams with no real legal backing; there's a reason they retain legal staff, despite being incredibly diligent about their copyrights. (I'm unaware of any cleared work turning out to actually be restricted; they generally take down a work temporarily on request, giving the contacting party a certain amount of time to come up with a renewal record.)
The result of this system is that, no matter what you think the law says, anyone with lawyers at their disposal can ruin you if they wish.
... and from your point of view, you're justified in murdering anyone who lives within a certain proximity of people who remind you of them, and they're under no obligation, moral or otherwise, to either care what your point of view is or to sympathize with it. So, from your perspective, you're morally equivalent to anyone who was cheering on the 9/11 hijackers.
I already knew that you inhabited a moral void of your own design, but I didn't expect you to come out and embrace the idea.
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I use mplayer with ESD output, as mentioned above; this works fine. I don't have any particular issues with the kernel itself (well, I do--yay for hard freezes due to the wireless driver shitting itself!--but they're separate), but I'm using the operating system as a whole, and while I appreciate the ability to put apps together in any way I wish, the standard methods it ships with should work properly. I don't know whether to specifically blame Ubuntu, or gstreamer, or GNOME, but something is definitely broken in there.
Ah; I see what you're talking about. Isn't this exactly what's provided by PolicyKit?
I plug in a thumb drive or usb hard drive and maybe the OS will notice it and mount it for me, and maybe it won't. Usually it doesn't. Usually, I have to become super-user and perform actions to identify the drive and mount it that would be beyond the knowledge of the average end user. And even if the user does know how to do it, why should they have to? A 10-second task just got turned into a 5-minute task.
Is it that the device isn't showing up, or that the device isn't mounting? That is, does it show up in the output from 'lsusb' or not?
I've never had a working USB mass storage device fail to detect and mount on any of my Linux systems; for me, it's been a solved problem.
USB scanners are the same way. They used to work, now you have to become super-user to use them. Some script that detected scanner plugin events and change the permissions just stopped working.
Weird. The only scanner juggling I've had to do was installing a particular firmware file for my Mustek ScanExpress 1200 UB Plus, because (a) it's not freely redistributable, and (b) there are several different scanners with the same USB ID, and I had to specify which one I had.
Multi-card readers: Same thing. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.
As these are just USB mass storage devices, I think it's the same permissions issue you're seeing.
I'd recommend that you open a question at Launchpad Answers and see if you can get some help on this. Something is amiss on your system, and fixing it is probably preferable to working around it like this. (I'm assuming that you're using Ubuntu.)
It seems unlikely this bug [EHCI problems] will ever be fixed.
Well, it certainly won't be fixed unless someone reopens the kernel.org bug report. (The original report was identified as caused by broken hardware; that's why it was closed.)
1. No reliable sound system, no reliable unified software audio mixing, many (old or/and proprietary) applications still open audio output exclusively causing major user problems and headache.
Yes, this. I'm running Ubuntu; I recently upgraded my work machine (driver is snd_intel8x0) from 8.10 to 9.04. I was hoping that PulseAudio would stop freezing up (sound-using applications become unresponsive, and I need to kill and restart PulseAudio), as I'd been assured that the various complaints about PulseAudio were all due to 8.10 shipping a bad, pre-release variant.
I hesitate to use phrases like "PulseAudio proceeded to shit all over my sound" or "play a simple fucking MP3 without skipping, like my five-dollar iPod knockoff does", but they seem apropos here. Perhaps Rhythmbox or gstreamer are at fault here; I don't know--I just know that even with the system idle, sound playback skips and stutters. Mplayer will play sound all right, but video and audio become desynchronized when using the PulseAudio audio driver. Using the esd driver, which is just a frontend to PulseAudio, works. Go fucking figure.
Inability to play a damned MP3 on the included jukebox app with extraordinarily common commodity hardware? What fucking year is this?
5.2 No games. Full stop. Cedega and Wine offer very incomplete support.
Hmph. Someone doesn't like playing emulated console games. True, it's nearly impossible to do so without breaking the law, but he could have at least mentioned it.
(Also, I don't game much, but I completed Eversion, a rather fascinating freeware game, on my Linux desktop, running under Wine without issues. It's not latest-and-greatest, but it's certainly something.)
8.1 Most distros don't allow you to easily set up a server with e.g. such a configuration: Samba, SMTP/POP3, Apache HTTP Auth and FTP where all users are virtual. LDAP is a major PITA. Authentication against MySQL/any other DB is also a PITA.
This seems weirdly specific. How often is this even required? If it is, using NSS with something like libpam-mysql/libnss-mysql looks pretty plausible.
12. Bad security model: there's zero protection against keyboard keyloggers and against running malicious software (Linux is viruses free only due to its extremely low popularity). sudo is very easy to circumvent (social engineering). sudo still requires CLI (see clause 4.).
Any authorization or authentication mechanism of this sort can be bypassed with social engineering. How exactly is this a problem in the operating system--what kind of OS lacks this problem? Should it be locked down so that a licensed sysadmin needs to come by and swipe their ID to allow admin tasks to be performed?
As for keyloggers, I do agree. An X11 keylogger can run without root permission. Give it a run; it's rather unsettling to see it gobble up passwords and such. I'm not sure exactly where the problem lies, but it seems likely that there is a problem.
That was beautiful. Thank you.
If the developer in question was doing this commercially, then points about priorities might stand. But it was done solely for fun, for love of an interesting project. To demand that people stop having fun is just... sad.
I'm unsure of what you're talking about.
The FAQ states that, first and foremost, don't change what the author wrote; if there's some kind of misprint, mark it for the postprocessor to deal with, but don't silently correct it.
Who told you otherwise, and how did you get the impression that this wasn't the sitewide policy?
I think it has something to do with a specific technical use of the word "energy" in signal processing. My best guess is that codecs apply a set of transformations to a signal and then encode the result; if the result is less energy-intensive, it's smaller when encoded.
Of course, this is just a guess, and I may be mangling the ideas. Search for "residual energy" to see what I've been looking at.
It was posted.
And, to be fair, if they'd gotten a hundred grand in grants a couple of years ago, I'd wager that development would have moved along quite a bit further. Unfortunately, codec optimization is a rather arcane and specialized art; it doesn't lend itself very well to contributors dipping their toes in.
Lossless formats matter less than lossy formats, because, apart from metadata lossage, there's no generational decay. Converting MP3s to Vorbis to AAC or whatever is a terrible idea, but installing the Xiph.org QuickTime package and turning your FLACs into ALACs is roughly as painless as this sort of thing will ever be.
Every single example stated above was in fact done away with, and replaced by, the libertarian ideals you seem to want to argue with.
Exactly! By the libertarian ideals, never sullied by any connection to inconvenient reality or history.
You're looking back from the present and attempting to claim that you'd have been on the right side of history. But the people who were waving your flag at the time--high-minded defenders of individual liberty and property rights--were arguing for subjugation and slavery. As much as you'd like to claim their opponents as your intellectual forebears, it just doesn't hold water.
I'm charmed that you seem to be following my comments since our last exchange, but I'm disappointed that you see things in such a black-and-white way.
I certainly didn't say that, as you put it, "if one thing in the past was bad, it all was bad". I'm pointing out that current perceptions of a fall from some sort of libertarian past tend to leave out things--the enslavement or systematic murder of nonwhites, the subjugation of women--which didn't affect members of the speaking group.
Like I said, if you're a white dude who's not bothered by slavery so long as it's not happening to white dudes, it looks like a pretty good setup. On the other hand, it's difficult, if you're not afflicted with the cognitive rot that seems to accompany libertarianism, to fail to notice that all of these holy, holy property rights seemed to be exercised quite regularly over the bodies of the majority of the population.
And no, I don't have to voice an opinion on fractional reserve banking, or farm subsidies, or any of a thousand other issues to point out that that's pretty damning.
He thinks we've fallen from the grace of our past, when slavery was legal, and women weren't quite considered human.
I suppose it looks like a libertarian revolution, if you're a white dude incapable of empathy. Oh, hey, I just described the majority of the movement.
If eight excruciating years of Bush taught me one thing, it was that I didn't know how good we all had it under Clinton.
Seriously, how fucking petty does all that bullshit seem in retrospect?
Here, you don't have to wait at all if you're lucky-ducky enough to lack insurance. You just go about your day and hope that the mysterious chest pain or disturbing bleeding goes away.
If it doesn't, of course, you'll end up much sicker and in the ER, which will be packed with other folks in the same situation, and if you survive, you'll walk out of there with enough debt that you may just be better off losing everything and going bankrupt.
But hey, at least it's not socialism.
As a Libertarian, I'm not the slightest bit surprised to see Obama take this stance. His entire -- but brief -- political career is replete with examples of such opportunism.
I suppose it must be somewhat comforting to be a member of a political movement which went out of style along with feudalism, so that you're perpetually an outsider, judging the Platonic ideal of your model against the real-world implementation of someone else's.
Trying to stop a legal precedence from being made where private companies should be afraid to help their government, even when their government is with in the scope of the constitution is not the same thing as continuing an illegal spying program on the American citizens.
That's fascinating, but since AT&T was illegally spying on Americans at the government's behest, how is it relevant?
I think we should have a legal precedent made where private companies should be afraid to flagrantly break the fucking law. Don't you?
And you prefer your morals to be ones you're uncertain of? Please, arguing that you shouldn't believe something because you've thought it out to as near the point of certainty as you can some is hardly a brilliant strategy.
I didn't say that it was unlikely that your ideas, as you define them, could be wrong. Because you've defined your morality to be, in essence, that might makes right--and claimed that everyone else holds this same belief--there's no arguing with it. It's self-contained, hermetically sealed. That's what I'm trying to say.
As for the rest? You're obviously confusing morals with mores. Morals are always personal and mores are always a societal consensus.
I dislike definitional arguments. By "morality", I'm referring to your sense of what right and wrong actions are. For instance, I think it's immoral to kill people because they make me nervous, or to expect to have different rules apply to me than apply to other people.
Above all you seem to be misconstruing what I've repeatedly tried to explain. There is no equivalency in morals. It is not possible for there to be without a complete lack of a sense of self.
I'm having difficulty understanding what you mean here. By "moral equivalence", I'm referring to your claim that you hold the same moral values as anyone who was cheerleading the 9/11 attacks. You felt threatened, and according to you, that justified violence carried out on your behalf. By your lights, that's the whole story.
For the purposes of this argument, that means that I don't need to feel Al-Qaeda are amoral bastards to want to see them rounded up and executed. All I need to do is give the proper response to their actions.
I suppose they probably feel the same--there's that equivalence I keep pointing out.
Hell, there were probably plenty of Nazis that were certain they were doing what was good and right; doesn't mean they were any less deserving of a good killing.
And yet feeling that same certainty, that same feeling that darn it, you're doing the right thing, doesn't make you wonder if perhaps you're the bad guy... because you don't think it matters.
You're obviously an educated person; please attempt to be an intelligent one as well. Think about what your brain's been fed before you just go believing it on faith and regurgitating it in public.
What exactly do you think I've been fed? Am I reminding you of someone in particular, or unwittingly quoting something?
Hard SF has more hard science in it, yes, but that doesn't inherently make it more difficult to read. Soft SF--Tiptree, as I mentioned above--can be just as impenetrable.
And the formalism is sometimes hard to recognize as such, since it's done so oddly. Eric Raymond wrote some interesting notes about that, though they are, like everything else he writes, suffused with his own brand of politics.
Oh there's no void in my morals. They're quite clear and sharply defined, thanks much. You just don't happen to agree with me.
They're self-supporting, self-contained and immune to argument or disagreement. They float, as it were, in a void.
I am more important to myself than you are to me. Therefore, my morals are always superior to yours. QED.
Spoken like a true psychopath. Aren't you the least bit familiar with the concept of moral codes that work well if everyone accepts them, both because they benefit the user personally ("I'm not constantly fighting for survival!") and they make for a more pleasant society in general ("We're not riven by brutal and unending conflict!").
"Every man for himself!" isn't a stable solution for anything other than a world in flames. It is a profound lack of morality. By claiming that no one has a better standing than anyone else to define right and wrong--that arguments about utilitarianism and such are irrelevant to your monstrously solipsistic ego--you're defining everyone as morally equivalent.
Nobody saying they aren't good; he's just very difficult to read, especially if you're not already steeped in the genre's forms and traditions. There are plenty of authors who are difficult to read; it doesn't necessarily make them bad. (James Tiptree, Jr. is another one that springs to mind--fantastic stories, but pretty difficult to get into.)
I'm no longer satisfied by hard science fiction that can't also be decent well-rounded literature.
I hear you. For my part, I'm no longer satisfied by decent well-rounded literature that can't be bothered to include some decent ideas. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be much of a barrier to critical acclaim.
Project Gutenberg clears works under "Rule 6"; some works which appear to be orphaned, published before 1963, are in fact in the public domain, but it takes a significant amount of legwork to prove this.
They've also advocated for reform on orphan works, so they have been active on this.
Distributed Proofreaders harvests a lot of data from Google Book Search, already, as well.
The Wikimedia people have staked quite a bit on the assumption that Bridgeman v. Corel will hold up in situations like the one you describe, so it seems at least plausible. (Note that Google could copyright scans in Britain, since their copyright law recognizes new copyright on simple slavish reproductions, as ridiculous as that is.)
Of course, the best thing would be for Google to simply not claim a new copyright on their scans.
No, now that Google has put the brunt of their weight and money on the issue, I would dare to say the next person who comes along will simply need to pay for the scanning service and access to the library.
Yeah, good luck with that. You'll notice that Project Gutenberg still gets nastygrams with no real legal backing; there's a reason they retain legal staff, despite being incredibly diligent about their copyrights. (I'm unaware of any cleared work turning out to actually be restricted; they generally take down a work temporarily on request, giving the contacting party a certain amount of time to come up with a renewal record.)
The result of this system is that, no matter what you think the law says, anyone with lawyers at their disposal can ruin you if they wish.
... and from your point of view, you're justified in murdering anyone who lives within a certain proximity of people who remind you of them, and they're under no obligation, moral or otherwise, to either care what your point of view is or to sympathize with it. So, from your perspective, you're morally equivalent to anyone who was cheering on the 9/11 hijackers.
I already knew that you inhabited a moral void of your own design, but I didn't expect you to come out and embrace the idea.