High school was like that for me. Going to college---even state school---was like night and day. Suddenly, the kids who sullenly made it a pain in the ass to be there vanished. I got to learn from people who were really and truly competent; I had the time to take courses that just seemed cool at the time, that probably wouldn't be useful in any future job, but I took them because I wanted to learn about something.
Yes, there were a few fools and charlatans teaching, but I dealt with it; I got to work with some of the cleverest, brightest folks I know.
For me---who'd never known there were other geeks out there---it was a transformative experience.
Clearly, your mileage may vary. But what you get out of school is, at the very least, proportional to what you put into it. Blaming The Man for not hacking it in school is pretty damn weak.
Richard Feynman is mildly famous for having said that "I love to think and I don't want to screw up the machine," electing to go with sensory deprivation instead of drugs to get a hallucinogenic experience going.
Grrah. And, of course, a few minutes later, Slashdot posts a front page story about printing on demand.
Too bad I can't figure out what the pricing is for these places. They seem not to post it on their websites. Any idea how much these cost, especially if you pick them up and don't have to pay shipping?
That's not obscure; it comes with a Wikipedia link. If I'd used a nonstandard spelling of some name to make it hard to Google, and not link it to anything, then I'd be obscure.
You're right; Gutenberg isn't good for readability. I've read a few books onscreen, and while I don't mind that much, I'd rather have them in dead-tree.
That said, Gutenberg has a much larger selection than Wal-Mart. (Not to mention that the Wal-Mart books are sold for more like $6 to $11.) Some of their 16,000+ books are things like "a million digits of Pi" or "an electronic-speech version of some popular book", but some of them certainly aren't. The "stuff that wouldn't be worth printing in the traditional way", as you say.
To do some testing-out, I downloaded Kinko's stupid 10MB tool to get some pricing information. I picked a random but popular etext (1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose)... and discovered that getting plain pages printed at Kinko's is grotesquely expensive. Okay, let's say you're a school and you own a printer. Let's say you own a duplexing printer, even. Paper is as cheap as $25/5000, so a 350-page book printed on both sides of the page would actually use about eighty-eight cents of paper. Toner runs something like $30/5000 sheets' worth, so the total materials cost would be about $1.90.
Binding at Kinko's runs something like five bucks for spiral-bind.
Pfah. Well, who knows. It could conceivably be worth the price at some point. Maybe if the pages were chopped in half to make the book more paperback-shaped.
Flawed comparison. The OP is still wrong, but your analogy sucks.
His situation: The marginal cost of his digitally duplicating one more copy for himself is pretty much nil. Any argument that the recording industry lost money is based on the idea that if he had not been able to score it for free, he would have bought the item, which is the logic that allows the BSA to declare "ONE HOJILLION DOLLARS" in piracy per week.
Your analogy: He can't sell his labor more than once. Labor isn't easily duplicatable. While 2 digital copies of "White Rap Song.mp3" cost the same as 1 digital copy, 2 hours of labor cost the employee (shocker!) twice as much as 1 hour cost him.
I was in Wal-Mart a few days ago, noticing that the 'Mart still sells "The Classics"---that is, out-of-copyright books---and wondered if folks knew they could get them for free via Project Gutenberg or the like.
The guy I was there with derided the effectiveness of Gutenberg, saying that it's wonderful for academics doing research, but few people have computers, and where does PG advertise, anyway?
So, now I just need to make up 'gutenberg.org' stickers and paste them around town.
I wonder how long it'll be before that machine that makes one-off paperbacks (damn it, I can't find the link to it) will appear in the local Kinko's so we can get paperbacks of anything in Gutenberg for five bucks or whatever.
I'm seeing a lot of "circumcision is body modification!" in this thread. But folks generally get piercings and tattoos of their own volition, while the "to circumcise or not to circumcise?" decision is made by one's parents. Or, I suppose, in some cases, hospital staff.
Point is, you can't really blame people for being circumcised, not the same way you can blame them for being pierced or tattooed. Now, you can blame them for having their kids circumcised, but that's different.
Question---are you claiming that the Ainu and other cultures that practice decorative tattooing for a large portion of their populace are slave cultures? How exactly does that work out?
Jamie Zawinski was one of the first few employees at Netscape. He was a major reason the Mozilla project was made open. Without him, there might be no Firefox today.
He's apparently gotten too old and tired to learn new things---he used Linux when it was much, much less user-friendly, and switched to OSX over, apparently, some sort of driver bug which ended up being the straw that broke the camel's back... but at least give him the benefit of "well, he was damned important once".
It's been on my reading list, but I've only gotten the plot synopsis from a friend thus far, so I suppose I was speaking without any authority there. Which you'd think I'd know better than to do.
I despair of even a 250 page short novel being made well into a film. Everything has to be cut out; movies tell us the feeling, not the story. It's a much vaguer medium in some ways. I'm thinking of "Starship Troopers" here.
I suppose the problem is that I can't think of a movie that had the requisite KABAM BOOM and still made an interestingly twisty plot.
Gutenberg release dates are only accurate after 10,000; before that, they're overly pessimistic. The project had planned to release etexts at a certain rate, but when they'd completed their planned quota through 2006 by 2003, they gave up on that idea.
I doubt that David Brin will be writing any Hollywood blockbusters soon. (His Uplift series, while it looks fascinating, doesn't look like it would lend itself to a ninety-minute BAM BAM KABOOM fest.
Serenity may be more your cup of tea, perhaps not. If the Firefly series floated your boat, the movie should as well.
His Dark Materials is being made into a series of movies. It's been described as a secular response to Narnia, but I haven't read it, so perhaps it's not what you're looking for.
Surprisingly, I really enjoyed Pitch Black. Vin Diesel apparently forgot how to act after that, but it's a pretty interesting story. You can read the screenplay; someone was kind enough to put it online. But that's not really that space opera-y.
I just found out recently that they're being marketed in chronological, rather than publication, order, and it seemed a bit like Star Wars, indeed. They're prequels, yes, but they read better out-of-order. Like "Pulp Fiction" or "Memento", the order of the story is important.
Slashdot Mirror
High school was like that for me. Going to college---even state school---was like night and day. Suddenly, the kids who sullenly made it a pain in the ass to be there vanished. I got to learn from people who were really and truly competent; I had the time to take courses that just seemed cool at the time, that probably wouldn't be useful in any future job, but I took them because I wanted to learn about something.
Yes, there were a few fools and charlatans teaching, but I dealt with it; I got to work with some of the cleverest, brightest folks I know.
For me---who'd never known there were other geeks out there---it was a transformative experience.
Clearly, your mileage may vary. But what you get out of school is, at the very least, proportional to what you put into it. Blaming The Man for not hacking it in school is pretty damn weak.
--grendel drago
Ah, thank you. I couldn't have expressed that half as elegantly. Bravo, sir.
--grendel drago
Richard Feynman is mildly famous for having said that "I love to think and I don't want to screw
up the machine," electing to go with sensory deprivation instead of drugs to get a hallucinogenic experience going.
--grendel drago
Grrah. And, of course, a few minutes later, Slashdot posts a front page story about printing on demand.
Too bad I can't figure out what the pricing is for these places. They seem not to post it on their websites. Any idea how much these cost, especially if you pick them up and don't have to pay shipping?
--grendel drago
That's not obscure; it comes with a Wikipedia link. If I'd used a nonstandard spelling of some name to make it hard to Google, and not link it to anything, then I'd be obscure.
--grendel drago
You're right; Gutenberg isn't good for readability. I've read a few books onscreen, and while I don't mind that much, I'd rather have them in dead-tree.
That said, Gutenberg has a much larger selection than Wal-Mart. (Not to mention that the Wal-Mart books are sold for more like $6 to $11.) Some of their 16,000+ books are things like "a million digits of Pi" or "an electronic-speech version of some popular book", but some of them certainly aren't. The "stuff that wouldn't be worth printing in the traditional way", as you say.
To do some testing-out, I downloaded Kinko's stupid 10MB tool to get some pricing information. I picked a random but popular etext (1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue by Francis Grose)... and discovered that getting plain pages printed at Kinko's is grotesquely expensive. Okay, let's say you're a school and you own a printer. Let's say you own a duplexing printer, even. Paper is as cheap as $25/5000, so a 350-page book printed on both sides of the page would actually use about eighty-eight cents of paper. Toner runs something like $30/5000 sheets' worth, so the total materials cost would be about $1.90.
Binding at Kinko's runs something like five bucks for spiral-bind.
Pfah. Well, who knows. It could conceivably be worth the price at some point. Maybe if the pages were chopped in half to make the book more paperback-shaped.
--grendel drago
Why?
--grendel drago
As long as hordes of naive users are acting as DDoS zombies, are installing spyware, are buying things from spammers, are still using IE 5.5...
Then I think the proportion of Slashdotters adblocking everything and spoiling the commons isn't dangerously high.
--grendel drago
Flawed comparison. The OP is still wrong, but your analogy sucks.
His situation: The marginal cost of his digitally duplicating one more copy for himself is pretty much nil. Any argument that the recording industry lost money is based on the idea that if he had not been able to score it for free, he would have bought the item, which is the logic that allows the BSA to declare "ONE HOJILLION DOLLARS" in piracy per week.
Your analogy: He can't sell his labor more than once. Labor isn't easily duplicatable. While 2 digital copies of "White Rap Song.mp3" cost the same as 1 digital copy, 2 hours of labor cost the employee (shocker!) twice as much as 1 hour cost him.
So, no, it's not the same. You fail it.
--grendel drago
Wow. You have a degree in the soft sciences ('cultural anthropology') and you're well-paid? That is impressive.
Wait, do you deal weed? Because while it's well-paying, I don't know if that counts as societal acceptance in the form of cash money.
--grendel drago
I was in Wal-Mart a few days ago, noticing that the 'Mart still sells "The Classics"---that is, out-of-copyright books---and wondered if folks knew they could get them for free via Project Gutenberg or the like.
The guy I was there with derided the effectiveness of Gutenberg, saying that it's wonderful for academics doing research, but few people have computers, and where does PG advertise, anyway?
So, now I just need to make up 'gutenberg.org' stickers and paste them around town.
I wonder how long it'll be before that machine that makes one-off paperbacks (damn it, I can't find the link to it) will appear in the local Kinko's so we can get paperbacks of anything in Gutenberg for five bucks or whatever.
--grendel drago
I'd be a lot more spooked if my surgeon had fifteen little bits of tissue paper stuck to the fifteen facial cuts he gave himself shaving.
Actually seen it happen. I wasn't the one getting surgery, but it's a little unnerving.
--grendel drago
I'm seeing a lot of "circumcision is body modification!" in this thread. But folks generally get piercings and tattoos of their own volition, while the "to circumcise or not to circumcise?" decision is made by one's parents. Or, I suppose, in some cases, hospital staff.
Point is, you can't really blame people for being circumcised, not the same way you can blame them for being pierced or tattooed. Now, you can blame them for having their kids circumcised, but that's different.
--grendel drago
Man, and here I thought they just looked cool.
Well, now. I certainly been told.
Question---are you claiming that the Ainu and other cultures that practice decorative tattooing for a large portion of their populace are slave cultures? How exactly does that work out?
--grendel drago
This isn't Wired . Or have you forgotten the myriad New York Times, Washington Post and BBC stories linked to from the front page?
--grendel drago
Of course not. Never. I mean, who ever heard of a $500 phone? It's not like you could spend two minutes with Froogle and find a bevy of them. Oh, wait.
--grendel drago
Islamists even say there will be many profits... Each with a new message.
A central tenet of Islam is that Mohammed is the last prophet. The last. No more, not now, not ever.
Sheesh. I know almost nothing about Islam, but I do know that.
--grendel drago
Jamie Zawinski was one of the first few employees at Netscape. He was a major reason the Mozilla project was made open. Without him, there might be no Firefox today.
He's apparently gotten too old and tired to learn new things---he used Linux when it was much, much less user-friendly, and switched to OSX over, apparently, some sort of driver bug which ended up being the straw that broke the camel's back... but at least give him the benefit of "well, he was damned important once".
--grendel drago
I think it's "Startide Rising" in English.
It's been on my reading list, but I've only gotten the plot synopsis from a friend thus far, so I suppose I was speaking without any authority there. Which you'd think I'd know better than to do.
I despair of even a 250 page short novel being made well into a film. Everything has to be cut out; movies tell us the feeling, not the story. It's a much vaguer medium in some ways. I'm thinking of "Starship Troopers" here.
I suppose the problem is that I can't think of a movie that had the requisite KABAM BOOM and still made an interestingly twisty plot.
--grendel drago
Gutenberg was ahead of its listed release dates for some time. Note that before they reached 10,000, some texts had release dates long after their completion dates. (That one was actually released in 2003, for instance.)
Gutenberg release dates are only accurate after 10,000; before that, they're overly pessimistic. The project had planned to release etexts at a certain rate, but when they'd completed their planned quota through 2006 by 2003, they gave up on that idea.
Common mistake, though.
--grendel drago
Why'd they have to contact NASA? And don't give me any crap about it being 1993; Project Gutenberg's pi to a million digits was released before 1993.
--grendel drago
Good luck.
You might also consider doing an ed2k search for "star wars new hope original", which picks up things like Star Wars Episode 4 - A New Hope (1977) Definitive Original Edition.avi, which I can't vouch for, but hey, it might just be what it says it is.
--grendel drago
I doubt that David Brin will be writing any Hollywood blockbusters soon. (His Uplift series, while it looks fascinating, doesn't look like it would lend itself to a ninety-minute BAM BAM KABOOM fest.
Serenity may be more your cup of tea, perhaps not. If the Firefly series floated your boat, the movie should as well.
His Dark Materials is being made into a series of movies. It's been described as a secular response to Narnia, but I haven't read it, so perhaps it's not what you're looking for.
Surprisingly, I really enjoyed Pitch Black . Vin Diesel apparently forgot how to act after that, but it's a pretty interesting story. You can read the screenplay; someone was kind enough to put it online. But that's not really that space opera-y.
--grendel drago
Never mind, someone else said it a lot better.
--grendel drago
I just found out recently that they're being marketed in chronological, rather than publication, order, and it seemed a bit like Star Wars, indeed. They're prequels, yes, but they read better out-of-order. Like "Pulp Fiction" or "Memento", the order of the story is important.
--grendel drago