Isn't polio relatively unknown nowadays as well? And if you want to talk about diseases, not just infections, you can add scurvy and pellagra to the list (with a large asterisk pointing out that food supply problems (i.e., famine) cause outbreaks).
The NSF does studies on scientific literacy. It's pretty bad, but the Europeans aren't much different.
Some examples: More than half of Americans think that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time, that lasers work by focusing sound waves, or that electrons are larger than atoms. (These were posed as true-false questions. The American people would have done better if they'd flipped coins.)
Hell, I was disappointed that I was well into college before I learned things like, "under the U.S. Constitution, the government does not dole out rights; you have rights, and the government is there to secure them". What the crap did they teach in U.S. History while I was there?
... but you might come off as a bit of a cackling white-coated elitist. Just a bit.
But I don't think you have to appeal to "they're all morons!"---I really do think that if you explain some basic principles to people, they can understand them. The basic tenets of science are not that complicated. Falsifiability isn't that hard. I'm sure Gould or Dawkins or Sagan must have explained it in a simple, accessible way. Right?
Hell, I'm convinced I could explain the basic tenets of science to someone without schooling in that area.
... is that you got modded Funny for this. I'm guessing someone actually didn't know that the Khmer Rouge really did that. Managed to send their whole damned civilization back to the stone age, pretty much. Not very hilarious for the folks who lived through it.
There are a lot of places where the Supreme Court has a murky-at-best mandate to be poking around at. But "for a limited time" sounds pretty unambiguous, as does "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Copyright as currently structured does neither---and extending the copyrights on already created works certainly does neither. I coulda gone for a bit of judicial activism there.
Actually, you can get a really decent high dynamic range image by extending only the luminance channel. We distinguish between bright and dark a lot more precisely than between colors; do a CMYK separation on a JPEG image and compare the Y and K channels if you don't believe me. The Radiance HDR format uses this trick; the only extended channel is an 8-bit luminance exponent; aside from that, it uses regular 24-bit RGB.
Didn't a bunch of the comments and stories that readers shared as replied to Katz's "Hellmouth" series get republished with no consent or notification of the contributors? Despite the "Comments are owned by the Poster" notice at the bottom of the comments pages? I seem to remember a bit of a tempest over that.
What happened to Katz, anyway? Whenever a major event happens, I think of him and "in our post-Saddam world", "in our post-Katrina world", or whatnot.
I was told that Barry Marshall and Robin Warren's discovery that peptic ulcers could be frequently cured by antibiotics instead of maintained with proton-pump inhibitors was suppressed until some major patent or another ran out and the discovery was no longer a threat to someone's monopoly.
I just got an email notification that Plague Ship, copyright 1956 or thereabouts, has been released to Project Gutenberg. The above link should work within the day. Enjoy!
Err... is there some sort of analogy for opening the specs of a complex and mostly-monopolized system so that competition is possible? I mean, if I were an 80 year old judge and the most complex technology I understood was the telephone, how would you sell me on this idea?
Hmm. So how does Google get its copy from the library? Presumably a library can't make a copy of a book and send it to another library, right? I mean, without paying some sort of royalty or fee to the copyright holder/publisher? I can see how, once Google has a copy of a book, they can show bits of it to people online and make it searchable, but I'm real fuzzy on how they actually get that copy in a legitimate fashion, unless libraries are shipping vast stacks of dead-tree volumes to sit in Google's warehouses until their copyright expires (i.e. forever), which sounds dreadfully silly.
Wait, wait, wait... your argument is that Google will have a large stash of page images, and that they could use these for blatant copyright violation? Shit, if that's your argument, you'd better never rip a CD onto a portable MP3 player. Sure, you're performing legit format-shifting, but you could send those over the internet to ten thousand of your closest friends.
The only trouble I'd see is the libraries having the right to make one single copy of the books they have for Google. But that's not what's being argued about here.
If Google starts disseminating entire books or useful chapters thereof, they should rightfully be sued out of their fat wads of IPO cash. But that's not what they're doing and not what they're saying they're going to be doing. And I don't think your nervousness about what they might do is or should be legally actionable.
In contrast, Google would only need to scan a book once to deliver it to however many people they please, however many times they please, at whatever fee they feel like setting. The publishing companies would probably wind up getting a cut, but nothing near the amount they'd get from selling hard-cover books.
Google Print doesn't sell books. If Google were charging people to read the whole book online, you'd have a point. Google has several restrictions in place (only view a snipped of a page, only view a few pages per day/week, some pages always unavailable), the point of which is (a) the book is not being "delivered" to anyone in any form that could possibly compete with the entire book, and (b) Google is not selling books.
With Google's plan, the tedious work is already done. Theoretically it could wind up being quite easy for any random web visitor to grab a book for free, pre-scanned, and then hold onto a copy themselves. If there's a charge required someone will just sign up for an account and give it out on IRC or what have you (this happens with Cedega already).
Look, if Google were distributing copyrighted works in any form without the consent of the copyright holder, I'd be first in line to tear them down. But they're not distributing them in any meaningful way. And your complaint that they could at some unspecified future point is ridiculous. We sue people based on what they do, not on what they might do some day.
If Google starts distributing entire books, or meaningful chunks thereof, then you'd have a point. But they're simply not. You're fighting strawmen here.
Really, try thinking about what you post before you post it. Your point is completely irrelevant.
At least in Canada, they have Life+50 copyright, so that they celebrate Public Domain Day every January 1. (This year: Albert Einstein! Next year: A. A. Milne! And so forth.) There's talk of setting up a Project Gutenberg in Canada, so at least old works from that era will be preserved, if not made legally available in most places. (Australia also has Life+50, but I think that's changing, alas.)
In any case, the set of books copyrighted by January 1, 1923 (not 1922) is indeed finite, but you might be interested to know (see Free Culture, p. 147) that the average copyright term in 1973 in the US was 32.2 years, because most (more than 85% of) works were not renewed. Due to retroactive extensions and associated bullshit, after 1978, works created 1964 or later were automatically renewed. But Project Gutenberg has a Rule 6 to deal with that. Consider (I think you may have to sign in to see this) Plague Ship, by Andre Norton, published in 1956, currently being post-processed.
'Course, the fact that folks are working hard to drag works into the public domain where they would be in a sane legal system at this point doesn't invalidate your original point. But Project Gutenberg isn't about to run out of material, not when they have a big chunk of the 20th century to deal with. (They just don't have anything particularly popular from that period.)
Oh, and PG doesn't really have 16,000 books. Some works were released in little bitty pieces. Consider an example. But there are still, I think I've seen estimated, around 10,000 real, individual titles in there. (Of course, any measure that counts the encyclopedia-sized "Modern Machine-Shop Practice" and the Declaration of Independence equally can't really be that accurate, now can it?)
... copyright is Life+50. They celebrate Public Domain Day. For instance, on January 1, 2006, the works of James Agee, Bernard DeVoto, Albert Einstein, Wallace Stevens, Hermann Weyl and so, so many others will be in the public domain... in Canada.
'Course, you may see some legislation before Public Domain Day 2007, as A. A. Milne will move into the public domain then. If not then, certainly in 2013, as C. S. Lewis's works, including the entire Chronicles of Narnia, will be released.
I thought you were kidding, but the man quotes the OCLC. It'd be a little more useful if I could cite the original OCLC study or estimate--do you know of any way I can get that? Man, that's a great statistic to use for copyright reform advocacy. Know any others?
Hey, if you want to make information more easily accessible, lobby for shorter, saner copyright terms, or some reform that would at least make the ownership of copyright clearer. Project Gutenberg would be all over works from the last century if they weren't stuck in perpetual copyright limbo, where they can't be republished commercially, since no one's quite sure who owns the copyright, and they can't be distributed freely, since they are indeed under copyright.
We don't have a word in our culture equivalent for what you refer to as "offended". No matter how badly you insult someone's Christianity, it is unlikely that they will put a death threat on you. It is very, very unlikely that the bulk of Christendom will accept a death warrant on you for saying (having never read The Satanic Verses, I can only guess) "JESUS HAD STINKY FEET AND I BET HE LIKED TO FIST LITTLE BOYS TOO".
I just can't imagine a culture so brittle that it can't tolerate that sort of thing, y'know?
The Germans have never successfully managed a genocide - unlike the North Americans!
Define "successful" genocide. The North Americans had diseases on their side (Spanish germs killed more than Spanish steel), and even then took several hundred years to wipe out the local natives--and they didn't do a very good job of it, as they're manifestly still around. The survival rate of Jews in Poland through the Holocaust was roughly one in ten. The Germans may have lost the war, but they were certainly successful in their genocide.
I was told by someone I know who was in the Navy (late sixties/early seventies) that he got to see a demonstration of the pressure in a scuba tank. They all got into a concrete bunker with the tank facing away from them, some ways off, and a remote-controlled hammer knocked the valve off. He said it went through a six-inch thick concrete wall. (I think that was how thick it was. I may be off somewhat.)
Many years later, he's working at a health clinic and some twit with an oxygen bottle throws it at someone else. Good thing the guy had it turned up to full blast (his clothes were probably saturated enough so that if you'd dropped a match on him, he'd have gone up like a roman candle, but that's a separate issue), because it was empty by the time he did that. If it had been full, I guess the best he could have hoped for would be it flying out a window or through a wall (not through any bystanders, hopefully), coming down in the next town over.
But anyway, think of them as rockets instead of hand grenades.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't polio relatively unknown nowadays as well? And if you want to talk about diseases, not just infections, you can add scurvy and pellagra to the list (with a large asterisk pointing out that food supply problems (i.e., famine) cause outbreaks).
The NSF does studies on scientific literacy. It's pretty bad, but the Europeans aren't much different.
Some examples: More than half of Americans think that humans and dinosaurs existed at the same time, that lasers work by focusing sound waves, or that electrons are larger than atoms. (These were posed as true-false questions. The American people would have done better if they'd flipped coins.)
Pfft. Clearly you're confusing real piety with the gospel of Supply Side Jesus.
(And it's "Reagan". Once is a typo; the second time, I gotta whip out my inverted-lowercase e adhesive badge.)
Hell, I was disappointed that I was well into college before I learned things like, "under the U.S. Constitution, the government does not dole out rights; you have rights, and the government is there to secure them". What the crap did they teach in U.S. History while I was there?
... but you might come off as a bit of a cackling white-coated elitist. Just a bit.
But I don't think you have to appeal to "they're all morons!"---I really do think that if you explain some basic principles to people, they can understand them. The basic tenets of science are not that complicated. Falsifiability isn't that hard. I'm sure Gould or Dawkins or Sagan must have explained it in a simple, accessible way. Right?
Hell, I'm convinced I could explain the basic tenets of science to someone without schooling in that area.
... is that you got modded Funny for this. I'm guessing someone actually didn't know that the Khmer Rouge really did that. Managed to send their whole damned civilization back to the stone age, pretty much. Not very hilarious for the folks who lived through it.
Now I kinda want to cry.
There are a lot of places where the Supreme Court has a murky-at-best mandate to be poking around at. But "for a limited time" sounds pretty unambiguous, as does "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts". Copyright as currently structured does neither---and extending the copyrights on already created works certainly does neither. I coulda gone for a bit of judicial activism there.
Is there some kind of overarching cause of all your health problems? I mean, arthritis and colon cancer at 38? What are the frickin' odds?
... when they have 200 to 300dpi displays. I want my vector desktop looking nice.
(Do we have a vector desktop yet? I know the newest GTK uses Cairo...)
Actually, you can get a really decent high dynamic range image by extending only the luminance channel. We distinguish between bright and dark a lot more precisely than between colors; do a CMYK separation on a JPEG image and compare the Y and K channels if you don't believe me. The Radiance HDR format uses this trick; the only extended channel is an 8-bit luminance exponent; aside from that, it uses regular 24-bit RGB.
Didn't a bunch of the comments and stories that readers shared as replied to Katz's "Hellmouth" series get republished with no consent or notification of the contributors? Despite the "Comments are owned by the Poster" notice at the bottom of the comments pages? I seem to remember a bit of a tempest over that.
What happened to Katz, anyway? Whenever a major event happens, I think of him and "in our post-Saddam world", "in our post-Katrina world", or whatnot.
So, are you hurrying to slobber over Taco's "coin purse" in the vain, vain hope that he'll un-$rtbl you, or what?
I was told that Barry Marshall and Robin Warren's discovery that peptic ulcers could be frequently cured by antibiotics instead of maintained with proton-pump inhibitors was suppressed until some major patent or another ran out and the discovery was no longer a threat to someone's monopoly.
But that's a rather weak case, so never mind.
I just got an email notification that Plague Ship , copyright 1956 or thereabouts, has been released to Project Gutenberg. The above link should work within the day. Enjoy!
Err... is there some sort of analogy for opening the specs of a complex and mostly-monopolized system so that competition is possible? I mean, if I were an 80 year old judge and the most complex technology I understood was the telephone, how would you sell me on this idea?
Hmm. So how does Google get its copy from the library? Presumably a library can't make a copy of a book and send it to another library, right? I mean, without paying some sort of royalty or fee to the copyright holder/publisher? I can see how, once Google has a copy of a book, they can show bits of it to people online and make it searchable, but I'm real fuzzy on how they actually get that copy in a legitimate fashion, unless libraries are shipping vast stacks of dead-tree volumes to sit in Google's warehouses until their copyright expires (i.e. forever), which sounds dreadfully silly.
Wait, wait, wait... your argument is that Google will have a large stash of page images, and that they could use these for blatant copyright violation? Shit, if that's your argument, you'd better never rip a CD onto a portable MP3 player. Sure, you're performing legit format-shifting, but you could send those over the internet to ten thousand of your closest friends.
The only trouble I'd see is the libraries having the right to make one single copy of the books they have for Google. But that's not what's being argued about here.
If Google starts disseminating entire books or useful chapters thereof, they should rightfully be sued out of their fat wads of IPO cash. But that's not what they're doing and not what they're saying they're going to be doing. And I don't think your nervousness about what they might do is or should be legally actionable.
In contrast, Google would only need to scan a book once to deliver it to however many people they please, however many times they please, at whatever fee they feel like setting. The publishing companies would probably wind up getting a cut, but nothing near the amount they'd get from selling hard-cover books.
Google Print doesn't sell books. If Google were charging people to read the whole book online, you'd have a point. Google has several restrictions in place (only view a snipped of a page, only view a few pages per day/week, some pages always unavailable), the point of which is (a) the book is not being "delivered" to anyone in any form that could possibly compete with the entire book, and (b) Google is not selling books.
With Google's plan, the tedious work is already done. Theoretically it could wind up being quite easy for any random web visitor to grab a book for free, pre-scanned, and then hold onto a copy themselves. If there's a charge required someone will just sign up for an account and give it out on IRC or what have you (this happens with Cedega already).
Look, if Google were distributing copyrighted works in any form without the consent of the copyright holder, I'd be first in line to tear them down. But they're not distributing them in any meaningful way. And your complaint that they could at some unspecified future point is ridiculous. We sue people based on what they do, not on what they might do some day.
If Google starts distributing entire books, or meaningful chunks thereof, then you'd have a point. But they're simply not. You're fighting strawmen here.
Really, try thinking about what you post before you post it. Your point is completely irrelevant.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
At least in Canada, they have Life+50 copyright, so that they celebrate Public Domain Day every January 1. (This year: Albert Einstein! Next year: A. A. Milne! And so forth.) There's talk of setting up a Project Gutenberg in Canada, so at least old works from that era will be preserved, if not made legally available in most places. (Australia also has Life+50, but I think that's changing, alas.)
In any case, the set of books copyrighted by January 1, 1923 (not 1922) is indeed finite, but you might be interested to know (see Free Culture, p. 147) that the average copyright term in 1973 in the US was 32.2 years, because most (more than 85% of) works were not renewed. Due to retroactive extensions and associated bullshit, after 1978, works created 1964 or later were automatically renewed. But Project Gutenberg has a Rule 6 to deal with that. Consider (I think you may have to sign in to see this) Plague Ship , by Andre Norton, published in 1956, currently being post-processed.
'Course, the fact that folks are working hard to drag works into the public domain where they would be in a sane legal system at this point doesn't invalidate your original point. But Project Gutenberg isn't about to run out of material, not when they have a big chunk of the 20th century to deal with. (They just don't have anything particularly popular from that period.)
Oh, and PG doesn't really have 16,000 books. Some works were released in little bitty pieces. Consider an example. But there are still, I think I've seen estimated, around 10,000 real, individual titles in there. (Of course, any measure that counts the encyclopedia-sized "Modern Machine-Shop Practice" and the Declaration of Independence equally can't really be that accurate, now can it?)
... copyright is Life+50. They celebrate Public Domain Day. For instance, on January 1, 2006, the works of James Agee, Bernard DeVoto, Albert Einstein, Wallace Stevens, Hermann Weyl and so, so many others will be in the public domain... in Canada.
'Course, you may see some legislation before Public Domain Day 2007, as A. A. Milne will move into the public domain then. If not then, certainly in 2013, as C. S. Lewis's works, including the entire Chronicles of Narnia, will be released.
I thought you were kidding, but the man quotes the OCLC. It'd be a little more useful if I could cite the original OCLC study or estimate--do you know of any way I can get that? Man, that's a great statistic to use for copyright reform advocacy. Know any others?
Hey, if you want to make information more easily accessible, lobby for shorter, saner copyright terms, or some reform that would at least make the ownership of copyright clearer. Project Gutenberg would be all over works from the last century if they weren't stuck in perpetual copyright limbo, where they can't be republished commercially, since no one's quite sure who owns the copyright, and they can't be distributed freely, since they are indeed under copyright.
We don't have a word in our culture equivalent for what you refer to as "offended". No matter how badly you insult someone's Christianity, it is unlikely that they will put a death threat on you. It is very, very unlikely that the bulk of Christendom will accept a death warrant on you for saying (having never read The Satanic Verses, I can only guess) "JESUS HAD STINKY FEET AND I BET HE LIKED TO FIST LITTLE BOYS TOO".
I just can't imagine a culture so brittle that it can't tolerate that sort of thing, y'know?
The Germans have never successfully managed a genocide - unlike the North Americans!
Define "successful" genocide. The North Americans had diseases on their side (Spanish germs killed more than Spanish steel), and even then took several hundred years to wipe out the local natives--and they didn't do a very good job of it, as they're manifestly still around. The survival rate of Jews in Poland through the Holocaust was roughly one in ten. The Germans may have lost the war, but they were certainly successful in their genocide.
I was told by someone I know who was in the Navy (late sixties/early seventies) that he got to see a demonstration of the pressure in a scuba tank. They all got into a concrete bunker with the tank facing away from them, some ways off, and a remote-controlled hammer knocked the valve off. He said it went through a six-inch thick concrete wall. (I think that was how thick it was. I may be off somewhat.)
Many years later, he's working at a health clinic and some twit with an oxygen bottle throws it at someone else. Good thing the guy had it turned up to full blast (his clothes were probably saturated enough so that if you'd dropped a match on him, he'd have gone up like a roman candle, but that's a separate issue), because it was empty by the time he did that. If it had been full, I guess the best he could have hoped for would be it flying out a window or through a wall (not through any bystanders, hopefully), coming down in the next town over.
But anyway, think of them as rockets instead of hand grenades.