An ex-physicist of my acquitaince would measure everything in electron volts. Just because a measurement system is good for physics doesn't mean that it's good for real world use. As a mathematician, I could try and get rid of all uses of degrees in favor of radians, but just because that's the only reasonable unit for doing many calculations doesn't mean that degrees aren't easier to use for the real world.
This whole thread is precisely why Computer Science should have never been allowed to fall into the Mathematics Department.
Where exactly has that happened? I've never seen a university that didn't have a seperate mathematics and compsci department, and UNLV put it in with the engineering college.
For computer science at Oklahoma State, I had to take Calculus (as required for all BS's), Discrete Math I & II, Theoretical Foundations of Computing and Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis, most of which are in the computer science department. (I eventually got my degree in something else, but I took most of those classes.)
How many practical computing problems have I run into in my carreer that have been NP complete? 0 - in 10+ years.
Really? Are you sure? What would you do if you did, and didn't have the algorithmic analysis to figure out that you needed to go around the problem instead of through it.
Furthermore, other classes are Design and Implementation of Operating Systems, Organization of Programming Languages and Numeric Methods for Digital Computers. I wouldn't be surprised if you hadn't implemented an operating system, implemented numeric code or actually used APL or ML.
If you don't want a Computer _Science_ degree, there's many technical schools that will teach you to program. Perhaps you should be complaining more about the Buisness schools (which are aiming for what you want) than the computer science degree.
A lot of times (I hear) things get installed on computers because users have, in effect, set their computers to accept commands and install stuff without any authentication at all.
So if you don't fence off a piece of land, it's okay for me to go in and install spycams all over the place? If I agree to paint your bedroom and don't mention that I'm installing webcams except on the fourth page of the agreement in 12pt print?
A law may come in to fruition, that if I leave and a draft is reinstated, I will be sent back here and possibly thrown in jail,
Become a citizen of another nation and renounce your American citizenship. Then there's nothing they can do if they instate a draft, unless you try to come back to the US.
You DO instruct your computer to install this stuff.
Just like if you telnet to your computer and sniff your password and use it to log on, well you left your password in the open, and you DID instruct your computer to let anyone in who has your password and username.
Fraud is generally illegal, even if you write out the details in the small print. Since there's no benefit to the user, and the user generally doesn't want them there, the only reason the user agreed is deception.
3. The patch, at this point, requires a kernel recompile. Not everyone running linux knows how to do that.
And if they don't, then they have no business offering shell access to untrusted users. If you can't recompile a kernel, they're not likely to be able to deal with the CPU, disk, and memory hogs, as well as definitely not being able to deal with the next local exploit, be it kernel or pingus.
This *is* worse than any windows security issue that has come up in a long time.
It's a local exploit. That doesn't rank above almost any remote exploit.
It also might be a good idea to turn off your telnet and ssh daemon (yes, even ssh) until you patch.
Turning off telnet is always a good idea. But if they can get in through ssh, they can do a lot of damage without ever having root access. In any case: oh, you can crash my computer. I'm worried, I'm worried! Like it's really that big a deal to reboot it. The fact that you had shell access on my computer is much more scary than the fact that you could crash my computer.
If you are *not* running linux or not running on x86, it might also be a good idea to test the demo code against your system.
Maybe this works on other Un*x systems. But if you read the patch, it's obvious that it doesn't work on non-x86 systems. It uses x86 assembly, for god's sake! It relies on the fine details of the x86 FPU. Maybe there's equivalent problems with the floating point exception handling on other chips, but that's going to take changes to the code.
It's analogous to the copyright a printer has in the typesetting of a book. You are infringing copyright if you photocopy a recently typeset Penguin Classic of a public domain work, but not if you transcribe it.
This is true in the UK, but not in the US. Typesetting a book in the US gives you no copyright over the result.
If I buy a book and find out that 2 pages are ripped out at the end, the store won't take it back after 30 days (or whatever their policy is) and the publisher isn't obligated to replace the book (and won't replace it).
There's an implied warranty of merchantability--remember all those EULAs and licenses that try and disclaim it? If they sell you a broken product, it's their responsiblity to fix or replace it.
No, you try again. The US Copyright Office has a circular that explains the duration for copyright. Old stuff has 95 years, new stuff has life+70, except for works for hire which is 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, which ever is less. That is as authorative as it gets.
Why do you think so many people are up in arms about the DMCA?
Because it makes stupid encryption schemes like DVDs illegal to break, and other things. Not because it extended the copyright terms.
Never said they could not have their own speech.....there are plenty of venues (strip clubs, cable tv, video....etc) where they can do this but not on the PUBLIC airwaves.
Why not on the public airwaves? They are part of the public, they have opinions and they have the right to express them.
That said, there are plenty of places that people can go to get this kind of entertainment.
And there's plenty of places people can go to listen to people like Rush Limbaugh. Why can't we dismiss him as entertainment and banish him from the public sphere?
This is all guarenteed by the First Amendment. The government can not arbitrarily silence those who annoy it.
In the US, due to the DMCA, copyrighted works which would have already fallen into the public domain, are now locked into copyright for a maximum of 275 years.
What??? The DMCA does not extend copyright laws. The Sonny Bono (aka Mickey Mouse) Copyright Extension Act does extend copyright laws, but not to anything like 275 years. Older works are under copyright for 95 years, and newer works are under copyright for life+70 years. Nothing like 275 years.
The publisher does own the copyright to a particular edition of a book, even if the text is in the public domain. That's one of the reasons publishers release new editions of old books rather than endlessly reprinting old editions - the duration of publisher's copyright is quite short compared to author's copyright (25 years in the UK, I believe).
It depends. In the UK, there's exists a 25 year copyright for the typesetting of a text. In the US, however, no such copyright exists. You have to make creative changes for a copyright, and all copyrights last 70 years.
I think the more common reason to reset a text is because it looks better and you can change the page size without changing the size of the type.
people want to know what is going to be on a certain show so they can determine when their children are exposed to that.
I don't want my children exposed to this magical-religious stuff that some otherwise realistic shows may fall into. I'm sure some parents wouldn't want their children exposed to evolution. The current censorship system only helps parents if they share your hangups.
It's just some pinhead decided that Cable was actually different because it's "private" and broadcast is public so they're held to different standards of conduct. Never mind that there's NO real regulation on who can/can't get cable or satellite past the usual credit stuff- so it's intrinsically "public".
So everything is intrinsically public and hence should be censorable? The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that you cannot force people to only produce things for a children's level; the only way the FCC gets away with it is because TV has to use public airwaves, which cable doesn't.
How hard would it be for a kid with a parent who didn't give a damn to set themselves up with cable or satellite and get porn feeds? Not very hard at all, if you must know.
Probably harder than to buy alcohol, drugs or porn. It's harder then for him to get a dialup connection to the wide world of internet porn.
It's not the US government's job to censor. That's why we added the 1st amendment.
Last I checked, Howard Stern was entertainment.....NOT the press.
Governments frequently fear jesters more than the press. If you can make someone an object of humor, that's often more effective then trying to reduce his reputation; it's a lot harder to defend against humor than slander.
I mean if you call having pornstars come in for interviews the press then....well...I guess....but not in my book.
So you're willing to silence part of society because you don't approve of them. What part of that is not censorship?
This is the classic example of why other countries find the US so damned frightening.
I doubt there's any country that doesn't put local laws above international treaties.
I find it highly unnerving that the country that claims to be the world's foremost democracy holds democratic ideals in such low regard.
Democracy is one man, one vote. If some despotic dictator has an opinion, that doesn't mean we should listen to him.
If the majority of countries decides one thing, why does the US so often do the exact opposite?
No government larger than a city-state is a pure democracy. Any sufficently large government becomes a confederacy or a federal system. The world government isn't even as formal as a confederacy. Every government retains its soverignty.
Do you think that the few thousand people on Tutuvla should have as much weight as the billion in India? Do you even think that the billion in China should have more weight than Britian or the US? The tyranny of the majority is still tyranny, and not one I'd like to live under.
This does suggest that there is anything in the public domain that anyone would want to broadcast.
But there is. There's a lot of material in the public domain because they were American works that failed to renew or register in the first place. Old news casts, most of Ed Wood's movies, a lot of Charlie Chaplin's works are just some of the things in the public domain.
I'm currently preparing something copied from TV for Project Gutenberg. It's not academic for me.
Furthermore, if you look around Wal-Mart, you'll find several collections of old public domain material on DVD, like old TV shows and old Westerns. It's obviously not completely acadmic.
To be fair, the FCC DID NOT throw Howard Stern off the radio. Indeed, his employers did - in order to avoid being fined by the FCC. This is not an insignificant distinction,
If I threaten you, whether it's with a gun or with the power to fine you, so you do what I want, saying I'm not responsible for what you did is absurd.
and the standards are not curtailing any personal rights (only the rights of corporations!),
The FCC didn't infringe on Howard Stern's rights? The First Amendment is all about the freedom of the press, which is by necessity corporate. In any case, once you curtail the book stores, ISPs, phone companies, newspapers and TV stations, we can still walk door to door and communicate.
If the FCC ever starts censoring _ideas_, we have problems.
Show me a way to communicate the idea that women should masturabate their clitoris in a counter-clockwise motion on TV or radio.
Christian radio stations don't have to worry about the FCC, but stations playing Howard Stern do. It's definitely not content-neutral.
only "poor people" buy the IDENTICAL storebrand version of a product.
That's not true. Actually poor people are more likely to buy the namebrand version. The middle class is more likely to buy the storebrand versions, because they are more likely to understand that they are the same (and many read magazines like Consumer Reports) and also have a better grasp of money management.
No. Just the end to warez and code your own adventures. For the vast majority of people their vision for computer use would be more comforting.
Except for the fact that it would be more expensive, the programs they want would be more expensive or impossible to find; nobody can pay $5 a box for licensing when the retail price is $15. And in many ways, it wouldn't be as good; the option of changing operating systems is part of the reason operating systems keep improving.
When you have literally dozens of choices to be made, most people will not sign on no matte rhwo attractive you make all the choices.
Just like people don't drive cars because there's so many models of car to chose from but only bus.
thus OSS and Free and in beer software won't be for consumers and never was.
I fail to see the difference. There's a dozen programs for almost any market in commericial software, but only two or three big names contenders. Most people chose between Netscape and IE; that doesn't mean there's not competitors, like Opera, out there.
The same thing is true for Free software. There's a lot of alternatives, but usually only two or three real choices. Most people take the standard GNOME one or the standard KDE one, especially if they have trouble making choices.
Italics are preserved _like so_. As a general rule, TEI doesn't preserve these things, either; instead it marks up things up as titles and what not. Again, most non-facsimile reprints don't preserve font size and formatting of titles.
[PG's TOC] no longer serves the purpose of directing you to the location of that section or chapter.
Use the search function, Luke. Hit control-F or whatever, enter the title name, and it should take you right to it.
I really don't understand why so many people think plain ASCII is so great.
Because everything supports it, and it's simple to produce. If FooOS doesn't support it, it's not a real operating system. If Foo Text Processor can't import text, than it's not a real text-processor. I can run grep and awk and vim on it and see a book, not a bunch of markup.
And because Project Gutenberg was not created yesterday. In the days when PG mailed 360k disks, the only thing widely supported was plain text. Now that we have 10,000 books in plain text, we can't change direction on a fly, so whatever formats we produce (and we frequently produce different formats when the book calls for it) we keep a plain text copy around.
project Gutenberg, providing important text to the whole world.
You want that we should be miracle workers? We do what we can.
who can read English
What, at least a half billion people? That's completely ignoring the German, Latin, French, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Bulgarian, Serbian and Chinese which have gone into PG in some quantities.
if the copyright has expired
Out of the about three thousand years of important writings, we're restricted from 95, or about 3%? Even acknowledging the desire for those books, we still have a vast array of material to distribute, and far more than 97% of the material that culturally priceless, the Shakespeare, the Goethe, the Carroll, the Bible, the Dhammapada, the Illiad, are available.
it's not that important or useful for most people on earth.
Nothing any mere mortal can do will really be important or useful to most people on Earth. That's no reason to denigrate what people do do.
Sometimes the illustrations that accompany a text are crucial for its understanding.
And you can include them in zip file with the text with appropriate markings in the text.
How about using the Text Encoding Initiative's TEI XML format instead?
Have you ever marked up a book by hand in TEI XML? I can produce an ASCII book suitable for PG in a hour or so, from the output of DP. Every book I've tried and eventually quit trying to produce in XML took hours and hours, and it wasn't in working to make a text that had fewer textual errors.
It's too bad they don't just use bzip2, since it can (unlike zip) compress the text without putting it in an archive first
The big problem is that modern versions of Windows and Linux come with zip decompressers, and they're pretty much universal on any personal computer platform still in use (personal computer not meaning IBM PC-compatible here.)
The same thing you complain, is part of the reason that they don't use bzip. It's more convenient to zip multiple files (like illustrated HTML) than to have to use two tools to compress it.
BTW, you can usually use zcat file.zip to read the contents of a one-file zip file.
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Now you repeat that, in imperial units.
An ex-physicist of my acquitaince would measure everything in electron volts. Just because a measurement system is good for physics doesn't mean that it's good for real world use. As a mathematician, I could try and get rid of all uses of degrees in favor of radians, but just because that's the only reasonable unit for doing many calculations doesn't mean that degrees aren't easier to use for the real world.
This whole thread is precisely why Computer Science should have never been allowed to fall into the Mathematics Department.
Where exactly has that happened? I've never seen a university that didn't have a seperate mathematics and compsci department, and UNLV put it in with the engineering college.
For computer science at Oklahoma State, I had to take Calculus (as required for all BS's), Discrete Math I & II, Theoretical Foundations of Computing and Data Structures and Algorithm Analysis, most of which are in the computer science department. (I eventually got my degree in something else, but I took most of those classes.)
How many practical computing problems have I run into in my carreer that have been NP complete? 0 - in 10+ years.
Really? Are you sure? What would you do if you did, and didn't have the algorithmic analysis to figure out that you needed to go around the problem instead of through it.
Furthermore, other classes are Design and Implementation of Operating Systems, Organization of Programming Languages and Numeric Methods for Digital Computers. I wouldn't be surprised if you hadn't implemented an operating system, implemented numeric code or actually used APL or ML.
If you don't want a Computer _Science_ degree, there's many technical schools that will teach you to program. Perhaps you should be complaining more about the Buisness schools (which are aiming for what you want) than the computer science degree.
A lot of times (I hear) things get installed on computers because users have, in effect, set their computers to accept commands and install stuff without any authentication at all.
So if you don't fence off a piece of land, it's okay for me to go in and install spycams all over the place? If I agree to paint your bedroom and don't mention that I'm installing webcams except on the fourth page of the agreement in 12pt print?
A law may come in to fruition, that if I leave and a draft is reinstated, I will be sent back here and possibly thrown in jail,
Become a citizen of another nation and renounce your American citizenship. Then there's nothing they can do if they instate a draft, unless you try to come back to the US.
You DO instruct your computer to install this stuff.
Just like if you telnet to your computer and sniff your password and use it to log on, well you left your password in the open, and you DID instruct your computer to let anyone in who has your password and username.
Fraud is generally illegal, even if you write out the details in the small print. Since there's no benefit to the user, and the user generally doesn't want them there, the only reason the user agreed is deception.
3. The patch, at this point, requires a kernel recompile. Not everyone running linux knows how to do that.
And if they don't, then they have no business offering shell access to untrusted users. If you can't recompile a kernel, they're not likely to be able to deal with the CPU, disk, and memory hogs, as well as definitely not being able to deal with the next local exploit, be it kernel or pingus.
This *is* worse than any windows security issue that has come up in a long time.
It's a local exploit. That doesn't rank above almost any remote exploit.
It also might be a good idea to turn off your telnet and ssh daemon (yes, even ssh) until you patch.
Turning off telnet is always a good idea. But if they can get in through ssh, they can do a lot of damage without ever having root access. In any case: oh, you can crash my computer. I'm worried, I'm worried! Like it's really that big a deal to reboot it. The fact that you had shell access on my computer is much more scary than the fact that you could crash my computer.
If you are *not* running linux or not running on x86, it might also be a good idea to test the demo code against your system.
Maybe this works on other Un*x systems. But if you read the patch, it's obvious that it doesn't work on non-x86 systems. It uses x86 assembly, for god's sake! It relies on the fine details of the x86 FPU. Maybe there's equivalent problems with the floating point exception handling on other chips, but that's going to take changes to the code.
It's analogous to the copyright a printer has in the typesetting of a book. You are infringing copyright if you photocopy a recently typeset Penguin Classic of a public domain work, but not if you transcribe it.
This is true in the UK, but not in the US. Typesetting a book in the US gives you no copyright over the result.
If I buy a book and find out that 2 pages are ripped out at the end, the store won't take it back after 30 days (or whatever their policy is) and the publisher isn't obligated to replace the book (and won't replace it).
There's an implied warranty of merchantability--remember all those EULAs and licenses that try and disclaim it? If they sell you a broken product, it's their responsiblity to fix or replace it.
Try again.
No, you try again. The US Copyright Office has a circular that explains the duration for copyright. Old stuff has 95 years, new stuff has life+70, except for works for hire which is 95 years from publication or 120 years from creation, which ever is less. That is as authorative as it gets.
Why do you think so many people are up in arms about the DMCA?
Because it makes stupid encryption schemes like DVDs illegal to break, and other things. Not because it extended the copyright terms.
Never said they could not have their own speech.....there are plenty of venues (strip clubs, cable tv, video....etc) where they can do this but not on the PUBLIC airwaves.
Why not on the public airwaves? They are part of the public, they have opinions and they have the right to express them.
That said, there are plenty of places that people can go to get this kind of entertainment.
And there's plenty of places people can go to listen to people like Rush Limbaugh. Why can't we dismiss him as entertainment and banish him from the public sphere?
This is all guarenteed by the First Amendment. The government can not arbitrarily silence those who annoy it.
In the US, due to the DMCA, copyrighted works which would have already fallen into the public domain, are now locked into copyright for a maximum of 275 years.
What??? The DMCA does not extend copyright laws. The Sonny Bono (aka Mickey Mouse) Copyright Extension Act does extend copyright laws, but not to anything like 275 years. Older works are under copyright for 95 years, and newer works are under copyright for life+70 years. Nothing like 275 years.
The publisher does own the copyright to a particular edition of a book, even if the text is in the public domain. That's one of the reasons publishers release new editions of old books rather than endlessly reprinting old editions - the duration of publisher's copyright is quite short compared to author's copyright (25 years in the UK, I believe).
It depends. In the UK, there's exists a 25 year copyright for the typesetting of a text. In the US, however, no such copyright exists. You have to make creative changes for a copyright, and all copyrights last 70 years.
I think the more common reason to reset a text is because it looks better and you can change the page size without changing the size of the type.
people want to know what is going to be on a certain show so they can determine when their children are exposed to that.
I don't want my children exposed to this magical-religious stuff that some otherwise realistic shows may fall into. I'm sure some parents wouldn't want their children exposed to evolution. The current censorship system only helps parents if they share your hangups.
It's just some pinhead decided that Cable was actually different because it's "private" and broadcast is public so they're held to different standards of conduct. Never mind that there's NO real regulation on who can/can't get cable or satellite past the usual credit stuff- so it's intrinsically "public".
So everything is intrinsically public and hence should be censorable? The Supreme Court has repeatedly stated that you cannot force people to only produce things for a children's level; the only way the FCC gets away with it is because TV has to use public airwaves, which cable doesn't.
How hard would it be for a kid with a parent who didn't give a damn to set themselves up with cable or satellite and get porn feeds? Not very hard at all, if you must know.
Probably harder than to buy alcohol, drugs or porn. It's harder then for him to get a dialup connection to the wide world of internet porn.
It's not the US government's job to censor. That's why we added the 1st amendment.
Last I checked, Howard Stern was entertainment.....NOT the press.
Governments frequently fear jesters more than the press. If you can make someone an object of humor, that's often more effective then trying to reduce his reputation; it's a lot harder to defend against humor than slander.
I mean if you call having pornstars come in for interviews the press then....well...I guess....but not in my book.
So you're willing to silence part of society because you don't approve of them. What part of that is not censorship?
This is the classic example of why other countries find the US so damned frightening.
I doubt there's any country that doesn't put local laws above international treaties.
I find it highly unnerving that the country that claims to be the world's foremost democracy holds democratic ideals in such low regard.
Democracy is one man, one vote. If some despotic dictator has an opinion, that doesn't mean we should listen to him.
If the majority of countries decides one thing, why does the US so often do the exact opposite?
No government larger than a city-state is a pure democracy. Any sufficently large government becomes a confederacy or a federal system. The world government isn't even as formal as a confederacy. Every government retains its soverignty.
Do you think that the few thousand people on Tutuvla should have as much weight as the billion in India? Do you even think that the billion in China should have more weight than Britian or the US? The tyranny of the majority is still tyranny, and not one I'd like to live under.
This does suggest that there is anything in the public domain that anyone would want to broadcast.
But there is. There's a lot of material in the public domain because they were American works that failed to renew or register in the first place. Old news casts, most of Ed Wood's movies, a lot of Charlie Chaplin's works are just some of the things in the public domain.
I'm currently preparing something copied from TV for Project Gutenberg. It's not academic for me.
Furthermore, if you look around Wal-Mart, you'll find several collections of old public domain material on DVD, like old TV shows and old Westerns. It's obviously not completely acadmic.
To be fair, the FCC DID NOT throw Howard Stern off the radio. Indeed, his employers did - in order to avoid being fined by the FCC. This is not an insignificant distinction,
If I threaten you, whether it's with a gun or with the power to fine you, so you do what I want, saying I'm not responsible for what you did is absurd.
and the standards are not curtailing any personal rights (only the rights of corporations!),
The FCC didn't infringe on Howard Stern's rights? The First Amendment is all about the freedom of the press, which is by necessity corporate. In any case, once you curtail the book stores, ISPs, phone companies, newspapers and TV stations, we can still walk door to door and communicate.
If the FCC ever starts censoring _ideas_, we have problems.
Show me a way to communicate the idea that women should masturabate their clitoris in a counter-clockwise motion on TV or radio.
Christian radio stations don't have to worry about the FCC, but stations playing Howard Stern do. It's definitely not content-neutral.
only "poor people" buy the IDENTICAL storebrand version of a product.
That's not true. Actually poor people are more likely to buy the namebrand version. The middle class is more likely to buy the storebrand versions, because they are more likely to understand that they are the same (and many read magazines like Consumer Reports) and also have a better grasp of money management.
No. Just the end to warez and code your own adventures. For the vast majority of people their vision for computer use would be more comforting.
Except for the fact that it would be more expensive, the programs they want would be more expensive or impossible to find; nobody can pay $5 a box for licensing when the retail price is $15. And in many ways, it wouldn't be as good; the option of changing operating systems is part of the reason operating systems keep improving.
When you have literally dozens of choices to be made, most people will not sign on no matte rhwo attractive you make all the choices.
Just like people don't drive cars because there's so many models of car to chose from but only bus.
thus OSS and Free and in beer software won't be for consumers and never was.
I fail to see the difference. There's a dozen programs for almost any market in commericial software, but only two or three big names contenders. Most people chose between Netscape and IE; that doesn't mean there's not competitors, like Opera, out there.
The same thing is true for Free software. There's a lot of alternatives, but usually only two or three real choices. Most people take the standard GNOME one or the standard KDE one, especially if they have trouble making choices.
Just think how much more it would be [...] if the current regime didn't perform forced abortions for population control.
Or less, when the area hit carrying capacity and mass famines hit.
What I meant was font size, bold, and italic
Italics are preserved _like so_. As a general rule, TEI doesn't preserve these things, either; instead it marks up things up as titles and what not. Again, most non-facsimile reprints don't preserve font size and formatting of titles.
[PG's TOC] no longer serves the purpose of directing you to the location of that section or chapter.
Use the search function, Luke. Hit control-F or whatever, enter the title name, and it should take you right to it.
I really don't understand why so many people think plain ASCII is so great.
Because everything supports it, and it's simple to produce. If FooOS doesn't support it, it's not a real operating system. If Foo Text Processor can't import text, than it's not a real text-processor. I can run grep and awk and vim on it and see a book, not a bunch of markup.
And because Project Gutenberg was not created yesterday. In the days when PG mailed 360k disks, the only thing widely supported was plain text. Now that we have 10,000 books in plain text, we can't change direction on a fly, so whatever formats we produce (and we frequently produce different formats when the book calls for it) we keep a plain text copy around.
project Gutenberg, providing important text to the whole world.
You want that we should be miracle workers? We do what we can.
who can read English
What, at least a half billion people? That's completely ignoring the German, Latin, French, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, Bulgarian, Serbian and Chinese which have gone into PG in some quantities.
if the copyright has expired
Out of the about three thousand years of important writings, we're restricted from 95, or about 3%? Even acknowledging the desire for those books, we still have a vast array of material to distribute, and far more than 97% of the material that culturally priceless, the Shakespeare, the Goethe, the Carroll, the Bible, the Dhammapada, the Illiad, are available.
it's not that important or useful for most people on earth.
Nothing any mere mortal can do will really be important or useful to most people on Earth. That's no reason to denigrate what people do do.
Sometimes the illustrations that accompany a text are crucial for its understanding.
And you can include them in zip file with the text with appropriate markings in the text.
How about using the Text Encoding Initiative's TEI XML format instead?
Have you ever marked up a book by hand in TEI XML? I can produce an ASCII book suitable for PG in a hour or so, from the output of DP. Every book I've tried and eventually quit trying to produce in XML took hours and hours, and it wasn't in working to make a text that had fewer textual errors.
It's too bad they don't just use bzip2, since it can (unlike zip) compress the text without putting it in an archive first
The big problem is that modern versions of Windows and Linux come with zip decompressers, and they're pretty much universal on any personal computer platform still in use (personal computer not meaning IBM PC-compatible here.)
The same thing you complain, is part of the reason that they don't use bzip. It's more convenient to zip multiple files (like illustrated HTML) than to have to use two tools to compress it.
BTW, you can usually use zcat file.zip to read the contents of a one-file zip file.